


Feed the Wolf

by Defiler_Wyrm



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anal Sex, Asian Stephen Strange, BDSM, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Comeplay, Dom/sub, Dubious Consent, Enthusiastic Consent, Established Relationship, Facials, Fisting, Intrigue, Knotting, Large Cock, M/M, Mad Science, Oral Sex, Original Character(s), Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rimming, Rough Sex, SHIELD, Sex Toys, Top Steve Rogers, Transformation, Werewolf Sex, Werewolf Steve Rogers, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:20:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 43,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26212555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defiler_Wyrm/pseuds/Defiler_Wyrm
Summary: A mad scientist gets the drop on Cap, but Bucky and company save the day. But as the full moon draws near, it soon becomes apparent that whatever he did to Steve has dire consequences that all of them will have to navigate carefully.In which Steve is a werewolf, Bucky has feelings about it, and SHIELD might actually be the worst.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 219
Kudos: 365





	1. The Terrible Dr. Interpose

**Author's Note:**

> See end note for spoiler about the dubcon.
> 
> Major thanks to my alpha/beta readers @buckybleeds and @HaniTrash for all the work you put into helping tighten this up from its rough draft. Your input was invaluable.
> 
> Special thanks to @tomix for the Russian translations.
> 
> Title from a Breaking Benjamin song; go give it a listen!

It began, as so many terrible things do, in some lunatic’s secret lair.

Bucky hadn’t seen or heard Steve in over half an hour and his concern was starting to ramp up into panic. True to form, Natasha was cool as a cucumber, but even as she counseled patience he could hear the stress of not knowing where their team leader was creeping into her voice. With Clint and Sam taking another wing, they systematically bulldozed their way through goons by the dozen, clearing one room of the bunker after the next.

“How does someone even get a following like this while flying under the radar for so long?” Bucky griped after smashing a man’s head into a door frame.

Nat spotted another one stirring where he fell and knocked him out with a well-placed kick. “You’d be surprised how many cults are out there. SHIELD didn’t deem him a threat until now. Probably because he was all bluster before this week.”

Bucky’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “You mean they  _ knew _ and just sat on it?”

Nat shrugged. “Again, you’d be surprised how often that happens. Most of the time nothing comes of it. And the few times something does? They’ve got us.”

“And we haven’t got Steve on comms,” Bucky griped. He held up a fist for quiet, listened at the next door, and ripped it off its hinges with his left hand.

The deeper in they went, the more alarming the bunker became. More and more rooms were set up as laboratories, some of them with staff huddling under tables, others with animals screaming at the bars of their tiny cages. All too many instruments looked familiar in ways that made Bucky’s stomach curdle. In one, a short, stout, clearly-terrified man with glasses pointed a revolver at them, and Bucky barely heard his own scream over the sound of his rifle as he obliterated the hapless scientist. The body dropped and he stood there shaking for a moment, grasping desperately for his mindfulness exercises; Nat asked him  _ very carefully _ if he was good, and he steeled himself and brushed the whole thing off.

_ He’s dead. He’s been dead for years. He can’t hurt you anymore. _

He couldn’t fucking wait to find Steve and get the hell out of this place.

During the next firefight Clint chimed in over the comms. “Found a key card. It’s either for a door, the elevators, or both. We oughta be close to the elevators now. Meet you there?”

“Roger that,” Nat decided, because Bucky might have been Steve’s right-hand man, but as far as SHIELD was concerned she outranked him.

Within a few minutes they reached the elevator lobby, followed shortly after by Clint and Sam.

“Lookit you, managed to make it all this way without getting shot,” Bucky smirked at the archer. It was a better option, he decided, than pointing out his quiver was looking dangerously low.

Clint made a stinkface at him. “I’m  _ great _ at not getting shot, screw you.”

“Getting punched, on the other hand,” Sam said, and Clint flipped him the bird.

The keycard panned out—mostly. It got them into the elevator, down to the third level, and into several locked lab rooms where Nat took photos. When they got to the large double doors ominously labeled “3-F: FINAL TESTING,” it was a bust.

Fortunately, Nat brought C4.

The room beyond made Bucky’s instincts scream  _ RUN, RUN NOW _ over and over. It was well-lit in a way he wouldn’t have expected a mad scientist’s lair to be, but just as full of arcane machinery and bloodstained gurneys. And there on the other side, strapped unconscious to a chair and several of those machines, was

“STEVE!” Bucky almost tripped over his own feet racing to get to him.

“Stop where you are,” called a—a voice so utterly strange Bucky couldn’t help but comply out of sheer startlement. It sounded like a carnival barker in falsetto. So there he was, the mad scientist himself, the self-styled Terrible Dr. Interpose (a name Bucky had had a _ lot _ to say about on the way in; real name Dr. Irving Gilliam), dressed more or less exactly to type with double-breasted lab coat, elbow-length gloves, and goggles. The crocs sort of ruined the effect though.

The four of them had weapons trained on him in an instant. “Give yourself up, Gilliam,” Nat called, reasonably. “Your little operation is over.”

“That’s  _ Dr. Interpose _ to you, and on the contrary, it’s only just started! As your friend here can attest.” Dr. Interpose manhandled Steve’s head. Rage flooded Bucky’s veins just before he saw something in the doctor’s hand. “Not so fast! I took out a little insurance policy in case there were more of you and looks like it’s about to pay out. One step closer and I’ll trigger this IV to pump your friend full of so much hydrogen cyanide even a supersoldier wouldn’t survive it. Especially not with that superhuman metabolism of his.”

Bucky _ growled _ . “I have a shot, say the word.”

But Dr. Interpose wasn’t finished: he held up the pen-like device and said, “And before you go thinking you’ll just shoot me, here’s the fun part: I’ve already pushed the button. The trigger is when I let go.”

All four Avengers cussed in unison and lowered their weapons.

The mad scientist took a few steps back. “That’s what I thought. Once I’m far enough away it will deactivate, and your dear captain will be safe—but only if you let me go.” Infuriatingly, he held up both hands making tick-tock motions with them while backing away to make his retreat. “See you later, friends,” he called from a doorway on the other side...and then he was gone.

Bucky rushed to Steve’s side, fighting off both a panic attack and flashbacks with every step. “Steve, Steve, I’m here, Steve baby say something,” he begged, holding Steve’s face and taking stock of the hellish device Dr. Interpose had him strapped to. There were IVs in both arms, steel bands holding his arms, legs, and torso, a metal halo covered in wires closed around his brow. It was the halo that made Bucky lose his fight against panic and the past: terror infused him and his brain screamed like lightning strikes _ no no not Steve not again please god no _ and he was in the chair and there was ozone and burning hair in his nostrils, he could hear the whine and crack of electricity revving up to take everything away in a storm of pain and someone was calling for him,  _ Soldat, soldat _ —

“Barnes,  _ Barnes! _ ”

It wasn’t— He wasn’t—

“He’s alive,” someone else said, “help me get these out of him.”

“Not Steve, please.” His voice trembled but it felt like a fog was starting to lift.

“Barnes,” the first voice said again, and there was a gentle hand on his shoulder that nevertheless made him flinch. “It’s gonna be okay, we’re gonna get him out of here, but we need your help. Can you help us get him back up to safety?”

“Sam,” Bucky gasped. He heaved a few breaths, taking stock of his surroundings again. Safe, he was safe. Steve needed him. He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes. Of course.”

Together the four of them unhooked Steve from the nightmarish contraption. Somewhere in the process, after the IVs were removed, Steve began to rouse. Bucky’s name was the first word to pass his lips, and Bucky was there in an instant, tutting over him and reassuring him. Nat and Clint excused themselves to inspect the lab, while Sam helped steady Steve from the other side.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Nat called. “Cleanup crew will catalog the rest.”

“What about Gilliam?” Clint asked, glowering towards the now-sealed door in the back.

“We’ll get that fucker later,” Sam said gravely and he and Bucky started helping Steve stagger towards the doors. “But right now we’ve gotta get Steve to medical.”

“Copy that,” Clint nodded.

“I’m okay,” Steve slurred, and Bucky immediately scoffed.

“My ass you’re okay, punk. I’m not letting you out of my sight for a week,” he swore. But by the time they reached the elevator bay, Steve was getting his strength back, and waved his friends off to walk unassisted before they reached the entrance.

“How’d he get the drop on you, anyway?” Nat asked him later, in the quinjet.

Steve blinked blearily. “Gas. Not sure what kind. It smelled like...methane.”

“He knocked you out with fart gas,” Sam deadpanned. “You know I’m not letting you live that down, right?”

Steve sighed, resigned. “Of course not. Did we get him?”

Scowls all around. Nat explained, Steve swore, and then went quiet a moment. “Those labs. Did we find any survivors?”

“A few,” Clint confirmed. “They were in pretty bad shape but cleanup is getting them to medical too, and then to quarantine.”

“Quarantine?” Steve frowned. “Why quarantine?”

Clint and Nat exchanged a look. “You didn’t look too closely at the labs themselves, did you,” she stated more than asked. “We’re not sure yet what exactly he was doing in there, but many of the test subjects we found had injuries that didn’t look like they were made by external force.”

Bucky’s blood ran cold. “You think he was trying to make a pathogen? A biological weapon?”

Clint shook his head. “No telling at this point. But SHIELD protocol is clear in cases like these. Which means, sorry Cap, you oughta expect quarantine too.”

Steve put on a brave face—to hide irritation, Bucky was sure. “Wouldn’t be the first time. It’s probably for the best. I still feel woozy and itchy from whatever he shot me up with. I got the impression before I passed out the second time he was only getting started.”

Bucky frowned and shuffled over on the bench to plaster himself to Steve’s side. It was probably the opposite of what he should be doing, but the drive to be there for Steve Rogers was an instinct he remembered before he re-learned his own name.

Clint was right, of course. They didn’t even get a chance to debrief before Steve was whisked off to medical and kept there. That wasn’t a surprise, but what got Bucky’s goat about it was they wouldn’t let him in to see his own partner. He wanted intel on Dr. Interpose. He wanted to know what those experiments were. He wanted to see his fucking boyfriend. SHIELD cockblocked him the entire way.

But seventy-two hours and a lot of caged-tiger pacing later, they released Steve, whose only complaints were hunger and boredom. They devoured a few steaks together as soon as they got to their Tower apartment—Steve took his rare this time—and then Steve summarily jumped Bucky’s bones all over several rooms, and somehow had enough energy left over to go for a run in the park. Any other time Bucky would have begged off after being wrecked seven times in a row, but after three days of “You can’t go in there, Sergeant Barnes,” he wanted all the Steve time he could get.

Steve was on high alert all through their run. Movement in the trees drew his attention like a jerked leash. More than once Bucky had to steer him back onto the path when he veered off in the direction of a bird or other small animal. Bucky chalked it up to what happened in the bunker in Ohio, but he still joked that Steve was acting like a bird dog.

“Sorry,” Steve huffed more than once, “no idea what I was thinking there.”

Afterward, they fucked slowly in the shower and then slept like the dead. Bucky woke the next morning wrapped in Steve’s arm, which was normal, and drenched in his sweat, which was not.

“Ugh,” he said, with feeling. Steve responded with a sleepy murmur and a roll of his hips that instantly told Bucky that certain parts of him were waking up faster than the rest. He desperately wanted another shower, but he wasn’t one to turn down a good thing.

Despite the heat of being wet with Steve’s sweat, Bucky shivered, and lifted a leg to let Steve’s cock slide in between his thighs. Steve murmured a playful growl this time, grabbed his hip, and rocked himself into the tight slot of Bucky’s legs, his cock nudging Bucky’s balls from behind. They moved together lazily with Bucky fucking into his own tight fist in time to Steve’s thrusts. Steve bit his shoulder as he came, and Bucky gasped, spurting hard with Steve’s name on his lips.

As nice as that was, the shower that followed was heaven.

Life continued as normally as it could ever be. Maybe a little less so, Bucky found himself thinking after a couple days. The night sweats continued, which was gross enough that Steve started sleeping in a t-shirt. He was randier than ever, which Bucky wasn’t about to complain about, and he got to be downright savage in bed. It was a nice departure from the way he usually treated Bucky like a fragile thing no matter how much he insisted he wouldn’t break. Sometimes a guy just wanted to get his back blown out and Steve was finally—and consistently—out to deliver. Maybe it just took what might well have been a near-death experience to get him to pull the stops out.

Steve’s appetite for food was just as strong. Meat and more meat, enough that Bucky teased him that he must be worried about spontaneously developing anemia. He was restless, more restless than usual. Bucky couldn’t keep him indoors. They may or may not have fucked in Central Park. More than once. It wasn’t that bad, getting all that fresh air, though it frayed Bucky’s nerves to be out in public for too long.

But then there was his mood. Steve was obstinate and temperamental at the best of times, but lately he was downright bitchy. He snapped at SHIELD agents and friends alike, once badly enough that Tony stormed out of the room and Sam cancelled three runs in a row. 

He even pulled rank on Bucky over minor things. Most of the time he snapped back but capitulated in the end. It was finding himself physically pinned to the floor in an arm bar lock over an argument about what movie to watch that finally, officially, made Bucky start to worry.

“What’s gotten  _ into _ you,” he yelped.

Steve leaned over his back and growled in his ear, “Dunno, but I can tell you what I’d like to get into  _ you _ .”

“No,” Bucky barked, struggling against Steve, “no way, you are _ not _ fucking me right now. Let me up, Steve, this isn’t okay!”

Steve let go like he was burned. “Fuck, Bucky, I’m sorry, I just, I don’t know what came over me.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know why I’m acting this way and I’m sorry.”

Bucky picked himself up and brushed himself off. “I love you but you’ve been a real bitch lately. Something’s up with you, Steve, ever since Ohio. The night sweats, the appetite, I like the libido but you gotta admit it’s unusual.”

Steve hung his head. “I need to report back to medical,” he said with the air of a man resigning himself to the gallows. But Bucky agreed.

A new battery of tests could only tell them that something was wrong, which worried Bucky even harder than if they’d found something conclusive. Something, the doctors said, in Steve’s system was changing, warring with itself. It had all the signs of a systemic infection without a single one of the expected symptoms. They put him on antibiotics and told them to hope for the best.

That night Steve was unhinged in bed. He bit Bucky hard enough to draw blood; he left bruises, though they faded as quickly as ever; he pulled Bucky’s hair, which Bucky was into at first until it got a little too hard. Through the entire affair Bucky was too dazed and breathless to tell him to slow down, let alone stop—but there were definitely points where we wanted off that ride.

He was quiet for a long time once Steve finally rolled off his scratched-up, well-bitten back. His eyes burned with unshed tears. Finally, hugging himself while lying on his side, he asked, “Where did you go just then?”

Steve didn’t have an answer.

“I like it rough, you know that,” Bucky sniffed, “but you’re scaring me.”

Steve’s sorrowful, sleepy apologies followed him on his way to the guest bedroom. It used to be his before they started sharing a bed full time, but he hadn’t slept there in months.

It turned out he didn't get much sleep there that night either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Dubcon spoiler:** In the last scene of this chapter, Steve gets too rough in bed and Bucky wants to tap out but doesn't, and is reasonably upset afterward. Similar will happen later on but with much better communication and outcome.
> 
> Side note: I didn't set out to have Dr. Interpose sound like The Monarch originally but somewhere along the way that's who I started hearing and I can't be mad about it


	2. All Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s condition takes a turn and things get hairy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s Friday in my time zone, technically.

Bucky couldn’t avoid Steve as much as he wanted to the next day. That evening, their tense dance was interrupted by orders to attack an AIM base that SHIELD had found out was gearing up for something terrible, and for a little while, at least, their domestic issues were forgotten. They went in with Nat and Wanda, the latter of whom had relatively little combat experience with the Avengers but had already more than proven her worth to the team.

It was towards the end of the fight, right at twilight, that all hell broke loose.

Bucky was in the thick of it, beating down and shooting AIM agents in ridiculous uniforms (what was it with evil cult-agencies and their stupid costumes?), when Steve gave chase to a retreating lieutenant around a blind corner. Moments later his agonized yells rose above the din and Bucky’s blood ran cold. He started wading through the goons in the direction of those screams, which sounded stranger and more distorted by the moment—what were they doing to him?! Bucky’s fighting became more brutal as he fought for scraps of self-control. They were supposed to bring these men in alive but he definitely snapped a few necks and caved in some skulls along the way.

The next thing he knew, a couple dozen yards away, there was _more_ screaming, and the unmistakable sounds of flesh rending, and AIM agents started pouring out from around that very corner. They weren’t on the attack, though; it was more of a stampede of panicked animals. Some wheeled around to fire their guns the way they came, but many outright dropped their weapons in their rush to get the fuck out of dodge.

In the next, mind-shattering moment, Bucky found out what they were running from.

It was a golden blur at first: the size of a Russian bear, a storm of claws and snapping teeth. For a long moment Bucky’s brain refused to process what he was seeing. The monster caught a screaming AIM agent in its jaws and tore him limb from limb, literally bit and ripped both arms and a leg off before snapping his head _clean off_ with its teeth, and Bucky got a good look at the lupine head, gore-stained snout, and bushy tail. _Werewolf. A fucking WEREWOLF_ . Was _that_ what AIM was up to here?!

Bucky hoisted his Skorpion and sighted the beast and that’s when he saw it: scraps of clothing clinging to its body. Blue pants, blue sleeves, a ring of red and white stripes around its narrow waist and

Steve

It was wearing

Steve was

Bucky’s brain flatlined. He stood there like an idiot as the werewolf made mincemeat of every AIM goon in the room. It barely registered when Nat skidded to a halt beside him, got a good look at the new development, and said, “Oh that is not good.”

And then, when the screaming stopped, it— _Steve_ —turned and bared long, knifelike teeth _at them_.

Bucky’s mind jumpstarted itself just as werewolf-Steve rushed them. He was fast, terrifyingly fast, and thank god Nat and Bucky were too or they’d have been laid open by his swiping claws. It took all he had in him to avoid the flurry of snaps and slashes wolf-Steve hailed down on him, pressing him back more and more. Those claws scored deep, effortless furrows in concrete where they missed his flesh. Nat took an opening to kick wolf-Steve’s doglike ankle. It didn’t faze him, but it did get his attention. Then Nat was the one literally dodging for her life.

“Steve!” Bucky screamed, frantic, as she tried to sight her Glocks. “It’s Steve, don’t shoot! Steve it’s us!”

Wolf-Steve wheeled and barreled towards him and Bucky scrambled up a nearby ladder to the catwalk he’d come in on earlier. He barely made it—turned out wolf-Steve could jump even higher than regular Steve. Nat took his lead and clambered up the other side. The werewolf roared, a horrible, inhuman yell...and climbed the fucking ladder.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Bucky cursed as he booked it for the other side. The catwalk swayed on its support lines and a lightbulb went on in his head. He let the snarling monstrosity follow him by slowing down just a bit, let himself get backed up to the other end where Nat was, and called to her, “The lines!”

She caught on and took hold of a support cable as Bucky took hold of the other with his metal arm. But where her grip was to hang on, his was to pull the fucking cable right out of the ceiling—no mean feat, one that made the arm scream in protest before the cable finally gave way. The catwalk lurched and wolf-Steve scrambled to keep his footing, jaws snapping fervently at nothing like a rabid animal.

“Hang on tight,” he told Natasha.

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” she assured him.

With his flesh hand holding the cable a bit lower than her, his metal one seized it where it connected to the railing and tore, and tore, and tore until it too, gave way. With a sickening shriek, the catwalk plummeted to the ground on their side, sending wolf-Steve yelping two stories down.

The werewolf picked himself up out of the rubble and staggered around, dazed and dusty. On instinct Bucky unholstered the pistol on his left thigh and lined it up, but he couldn’t pull the trigger.

“Take the shot!” Nat yelled.

“It’s Steve,” he yelled back.

“Take the fucking shot!”

“I CAN’T!”

While they went back and forth about it, Wanda burst into the room from the other side, and all eyes were on her. Including, unfortunately, the werewolf’s.

“Wanda, it’s Steve,” Bucky yelled at the top of his lungs, “it’s Steve! The wolf is Steve!”

He could only pray she heard him. Wolf-Steve roared and charged her, and Wanda raised her hands, and that freaky red cloud of hers appeared. It swiftly enveloped wolf-Steve and he stumbled to a stop. He shook his head, roar-howling again, thrashing to and fro, but the red mist kept him from advancing. Bucky held his breath as the werewolf seemed to lose his balance, knelt, and finally slumped down to the blood-slick ground.

They all stayed where they were for a full minute. When the werewolf still didn’t move, Bucky let go of the cable and landed light on his feet, and motioned for Nat that he would catch her, which he did. He set her down and trotted over, retrieving his rifle along the way. The air was thick with the stench of blood and rent bowels.

“Is he—“

“He’s alive,” Wanda assured him. “Bucky, what happened? This is...this is _Steve_ …. He was so angry…. How…?”

“I wish I knew. Maybe they—” And then he knew, and he swore. “Interpose.”

“Ohio?” Nat guessed, just behind him.

Bucky nodded numbly. In repose, the beast had a terrible beauty to him. His head was almost completely wolflike, his shoulders broader than ever, his muscles bulging even in unconsciousness. His entire body was covered in brown, gold, and white fur, from his whiskered nose to the tip of his tail.

“He’s been different lately,” he heard himself saying. “Short-tempered, craving red meat, wants to be outside most of the time and up my—in bed with me the rest of the time. The doctors thought he had an infection of some kind. I never would have guessed it was….”

“Lycanthropy?” Nat finished. Now that the fight was over, she was as cool as ever. Given Bucky was currently losing his mind in slow motion, it was honestly a little irritating. “That’s a new one by me too.”

Bucky jolted. “Oh my god. He bit me. Not—not tonight, last night. Am I gonna….”

“I think that only works if they’re changed,” Nat tries to reassure him. “What I wanna know is, what happens when he wakes up?”

“Ugghhhhh,” wolf-Steve said, right on cue. Nat and Bucky whipped their guns up on impulse; Wanda’s hands became clouded in red. Wolf-Steve rubbed his face with a blood-sticky paw and staggered up onto unsteady feet. “What...happened…. F-feel weird….”

“Steve?” Bucky’s voice nearly failed him.

“Bucky,” wolf-Steve answered, turning towards him. Jesus fuck he had to be seven feet tall. “Smells...awful…. Why is it...hhhard to...talk….”

He looked down at his hands—his _paws_ —and had himself a proper little freak-out.

Wanda stepped out of his way and looked up at the skylight. “The moon….”

They all looked. It was full, as golden as Steve’s thick fur. Bucky cussed.

“Oh god,” wolf-Steve choked, “oh god, I tried...to kill you….” He looked around them and his ears flattened. “I did...all this...didn’t I…?”

“You weren’t yourself,” Bucky told him. “You’re uh. Still not yourself.”

Steve covered his face with his paw-hands, then used them to inspect his muzzle and those terrifying fangs, whining like a dog. “Oh god,” he moaned.

“Cleanup crew is gonna be here soon,” Nat said. “We need a plan.”

“Radio Control then,” Bucky snapped at her.

Wanda, meanwhile, was inching towards wolf-Steve with her hands up in placation. “Steve. I don’t know what they did to you but you will be okay, yes? I was able to unblock your mind, I folded the rage away.”

“Th-thank you,” wolf-Steve snuffled. “So hungry….” He looked at the corpses (and pieces of corpses) strewn around them again. His ears pricked up, then flattened. “T-tell me...I didn’t….”

“You didn’t eat anyone,” Bucky said. He took his turn to inch closer.

Wolf-Steve lowered his great shaggy head into Bucky’s proffered hands and allowed himself to get petted. His fur was coarse in some places, soft in others. His ears were very soft indeed. Bucky swore to himself not to tease Steve about his wagging tail.

“Cleanup is gonna be here soon, pal,” he told the werewolf—his werewolf boyfriend, he thought hysterically—gently. “Don’t spook on us and go crazy again when they get here, okay? We’re gonna get through this, you and me. And we’re gonna fuckin’ kill that Interpose schmuck that did this to you.”

Wolf-Steve held Bucky’s gaze for a moment. Still the same green-flecked blue. He gave Bucky’s face a slow, careful lick and grumbled close to his ear: “You smell really good.”

Bucky sucked in a sharp breath—and that was the moment cleanup chose to show up. They balked at the doorway, no doubt partly because of the body parts and gore everywhere, partly because there was _a fucking werewolf_ standing there with the Avengers in the room, absolutely covered in blood. Even after Nat reassured them that the werewolf situation was handled, they moved very, very carefully.

Bucky kept a hand on Steve the whole way back to the quinjet; Nat carried the shield, retrieved from the spot where Steve had changed. “After you did your….” He wiggled his fingers at Wanda. “Thing, why didn’t he change back?”

Wanda pursed her lips. “In Sokovia, we have folktales of a creature called _vrykolak_. Something like how you would call a cross between werewolf and vampire. It only comes out at night. Maybe he will change back when the sun returns.”

“Fuckin’ hope so,” Bucky sighed. Wolf-Steve whined.

Nat glanced at them. “In Western Europe the werewolf changes with the full moon. Our best guess right now is either it’s like that or it’s permanent.”

Wolf-Steve whined harder. “Don’t even say that,” Bucky growled.

Nat shrugged. “We should manage expectations.”

“I don’t w-want to...s-sh-stay like this,” wolf-Steve said miserably. “Too many smells. Too hungry.”

Bucky made reassuring noises at him, petting the non-bloody parts of his furry face as they settled into the jet, but Nat was right. He couldn’t make promises at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Subsequent chapters are gonna get longer. Feedback fuels me. 💜


	3. That’s Cannibalism, Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SHIELD and the Avengers learn some important things about Capwolf.

Instead of heading back to the Tower, they diverted upstate to the sprawling Avengers compound that in reality was more a base of operations for the new SHIELD. Capwolf, as Bucky decided to call him, got swept away by clearly-terrified agents to a supersoldier-proof cell for observation. Bucky protested. He got overruled. Capwolf himself agreed to the containment, so that, Bucky supposed, was that.

Of course it was a new battery of tests. Physicals, x-rays, MRIs, blood draws, the works. This time Bucky raised enough of a stink that they let him watch from the other side of the...super-glass, or whatever the transparent walls were made of. Anything to keep his eyes on his man. Wolf. Wolfman. He had plenty of time to stew over the fact that SHIELD had entire containment facilities designed to imprison Steve and himself while the whitecoats bustled around. 

The testing went on all through the night. In the end, they could give him nothing but long words and failed hypotheses. Bucky wound up falling asleep propped up against the glass.

With dawn came the miracle they’d all been hoping for. Bucky missed the act itself, but Steve returned to his human self, and promptly conked out after being supplied a pair of sweatpants for his modesty. 

Bucky spent a few hours just watching him sleep from the other side of the glass. Wanda brought Bucky breakfast; Nat brought him lunch. It wasn’t till mid-afternoon that Steve finally woke up: disoriented, ravenously hungry, and from what Bucky could tell, as melodramatically angsty as an Irishman ever was.

Well. That was his right. He did spend the night as a killer wolf monster, after all.

The scientists explained to Bucky that Steve’s hunger was likely due to the immense metabolic expenditure of transformation: changing burned up all his energy and left his body howling for more. It made sense, Bucky supposed.

They let the lovers talk through the glass between tests. “There’s my furball,” Bucky crooned.

Steve made a face. “I don’t think I’m in a place where I’m comfortable joking about it yet.”

Bucky nodded, abashed. “Sorry, sorry, babe. I’m just real glad to see you back to your old self. How d’you feel?”

“My mouth still tastes like an abattoir and I’m more tired than I’ve been since before Project Rebirth,” Steve sighed. “And hungrier than I’ve been since France. And dreading nightfall. Kinda sucks, pal.”

Bucky stroked the glass as if he could reach through and touch Steve’s face. “I know. I’m sorry. But we’ll figure it out. Always have, right?”

Steve smiled at him, and it broke Bucky’s heart to see the fond sadness in it. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Listen, they’re telling me Wanda’s gonna be on hand tonight in case things get hairy.”

“Thought you said you weren’t ready to joke about it.”

“Maybe it’s different when  _ I _ say it,” Steve shrugged, and Bucky laughed under his breath. “Everyone’s walking on eggshells around me. Tell me something honestly, Bucky. I could literally smell the fear on you last night. Are you still scared of me?”

Bucky scoffed. “You worry me day and night but I ain’t afraid of you, Steve.”

Steve regarded him a moment...then lunged at him, teeth bared in a snarl, hitting the glass with a  _ thud _ .

And Bucky, damn him, jumped back.

“Steve,” he tried.

“That’s what I thought,” Steve said mopily, and turned to go back to his tests.

“Steve that’s not fair!” Bucky bonked his forehead on the glass, deflated, one hand pressed to the pane as Steve left his view entirely.

There was nothing more here could do here. That didn’t mean there was nothing more he could do.

* * *

He packed up bags from their Tower apartment mostly on autopilot and unpacked it in their suite on the compound in the same fugue. Bucky was staring listlessly at a page about wolfsbane and silver bullets on his laptop when Natasha let herself in.

“Stark’s running media surveillance for Interpose,” she announced, standing out of arm’s reach. “He’s also trying to get hold of a Dr. Strange, real name, but he’s kinda notoriously hard to reach.”

Bucky grunted. Even if she did bring him food earlier, he still wasn’t happy to see her after she tried to get him to shoot his own lover. On the other hand, he was both lonely and getting nowhere on his own.

“What’s this Strange guy’s deal?”

Nat raised an eyebrow. “Apparently he’s a wizard,” she sighed.

Bucky cast his eyes skyward and tossed his hands up a little. “Because  _ that’s _ a thing that exists now too. He know anything about werewolves?”

“We’ll find out, if we can make contact.”

Bucky scratched the stubble on his chin. “Aliens, laser guns, flying robots, fuckin’ wizards. And  _ werewolves _ . You’d think it’d be a known factor by now but everything about it just sounds like bullshit.”

“I agree,” Nat said, and Bucky finally looked up at her. “A man physically transforming into a super-strong, unreasoning killing machine is just patently ridiculous. Who would ever believe that.”

Annoyingly, not only was her smartass sarcasm dead right—Bruce existed, so why not goddamn werewolves?—but that he felt a swell of fondness for her about it. He ran a restless hand through his hair. “I just don’t know what else I can do.”

“We’re spies,” she shrugged; “we should do what spies do.”

“ _ You’re _ a spy. I’m a covert operative. It’s different.”

“If you say so,  _ Stariná Volk _ .”

He snorted at the endearment. “I think that’s Steve now,  _ pauchok _ .”

She nodded sideways. “Are semantics going to help Steve right now?” And with that, she left.

It only took a moment of annoyed stewing for him to cuss out loud and follow.

* * *

Intel hunts were often cases of “hurry up and wait.” They required patience, something Bucky was not long on when he wasn’t in a sniper’s nest, and it was with great irritation that he returned empty-handed to the supersoldier cell. He blamed it on the fact that they had to call their search short on account of impending nightfall. If something was going to happen, he was going to be there for it. For Steve.

He was joined by Stark, Nat, Wanda, and a small army of SHIELD agents armed with the kind of tranqs typically used on polar bears. Steve was alone in his cell, pacing and scratching at his skin. Bucky’s stomach sank with the sun.

Before coming here Bucky had looked up the time of moonrise that night. The closer it drew, the more agitated Steve became. All he would say to them was, “It’s coming, I can feel it, it’s coming.”

Bucky checked his phone for the time. They were indoors underground—no chance for moonlight to fall on Steve’s form—but at the precise predicted moment, he doubled over gagging, and Bucky forgot to breathe.

Steve cried out as his body spasmed. His face and back distorted; his limbs shook; every muscle bulged as he thrashed and curled. His voice was the first obvious change. It took on a deeper, ragged quality with every rasping cry. Bucky made an unconscious noise and plastered himself to the glass when he heard bones pop. God, even if Steve hadn’t been screaming, it _ looked _ like agony. It hurt to watch but Bucky made himself do it anyway.

Soon, with more tearing and popping sounds that turned Bucky’s stomach, Steve’s arms, neck, and face were growing longer. He pitched forward on his toes as his feet stretched horribly, forcing his knees to bend for balance. A tail—hairless at first, but quickly sprouting fur just like the rest of his skin—squirmed out of his pelvis. His ears grew pointed and traveled up his skull. Every nail cracked and popped free of its bed as thick claws grew in their place. His shoulders dropped forward somewhat, and his face—

God, his face was the hardest thing to look at in the in-between stages. Tears stung Bucky’s eyes. Steve cried out again, and it was more howl than scream. Blood poured from his mouth: his teeth fell out in a clattering cascade, replaced by fearsome fangs. Before, he’d been gulping for breath; now he was panting for it. His tongue lolled out flat and long; whiskers pushed their way out of the skin of his new snout. Once more he howled, and the sound put a fear in Bucky’s bones that made them quake.

The werewolf stood before them, and he bared his teeth, and lunged.

Everyone on the other side of the glass scrambled backwards when Capwolf’s body collided with it, and stared in mute horror as the beast scrabbled at the wall with his claws and pressed his snapping jaws to it, trying with all his might to push through.

Everyone, that is, except Bucky. When the rest of them scattered, Bucky made himself stand right up against the glass. He owed Steve that much. He owed himself that much.

“It’s holding,” Stark called, but no one really relaxed all the same.

“Wanda, you’re up,” Bucky said with a mouth gone dry. She edged forward and raised her hands to do her Freaky Red Lights Thing. Even supersoldier-proof glass couldn’t stop the...whatever it was that she was projecting, mind powers, magic, Bucky wasn’t clear on that and at the moment he really didn’t care.

Just like the night before, Capwolf stopped in his tracks as the scarlet cloud surrounded him; this time, though, he seemed to go even madder around it, swiping and snapping at the energy field as if it was a foe he could tear apart.

“He’s fighting me,” Wanda said, her voice strained.

“You’ve got this, come on,” Bucky told her.

The battle of wills continued and in the end, Wanda was the victor: the werewolf crumpled to the floor panting, and finally his hulking, furry body went limp.

No one dared to make a sound until Capwolf did; even Stark was uncharacteristically silent. A few moments later, the werewolf groaned and blinked his way back to consciousness—alert and cogent, if confused. 

“Happened...again,” he growled. 

God help him, something about that bedrock-deep voice was doing things to Bucky. He blamed it on adrenaline and tried to will his dick to calm down.

“Ng-n-no one...hurt?” Capwolf asked timidly.

“No one’s hurt, buddy,” Bucky assured him. “Feeling better?”

“Feel...hungry.”

“You know,” and oh god, Stark found his voice again, “all things considered, for the first time ever I think Banner _ actually _ got the better end of the bargain here. Have we tried this with the Big Guy? We should definitely try this with the Big Guy.”

“One thing at a time, Tony,” Nat said.

Stark waved her off. “Could we— could we get this guy some food here? What’ll it be, champ, Alpo? Pedigree? Ol’ Roy?” Steve glared daggers and put his ears back. “I bet you’re a Blue Buffalo guy.”

“F-f-fuck...you...Tony.” He bared his fangs and Bucky got a vindictive little thrill at seeing Stark’s face go pale again. “Meat. Rrrrrrawww.”

Stark swallowed thickly, but rallied himself. “You heard the man, go raid the fridge,” he told the SHIELD agents, who were all too glad to scurry away from the seven-foot-tall wolf monster in ragged sweatpants.

“Mw-mw-w-Wanda. Thank you,” Capwolf said in his labored way. His new mouth had more trouble with some sounds than others, it seemed. He put a paw-hand flat on the glass and she did the same against it, her hand utterly dwarfed by his.

“Anything for you,  _ veliki brat _ ,” she said fondly. “Can you remember anything from the rage?”

Capwolf thought about it, and shook his head. “Angry. N-ng-need to...kill. M-make it...stop.”

Bucky frowned. “Make what stop?”

“Hunger. Movement. Not sure...what else. I don’t...know. Blurry.”

“I’m sorry, but that was cute as hell,” Stark cut in. “Did anyone else see that? Barnes piped up and Cap’s _ tail wagged _ .”

“Tony,” Nat warned.

“I’m just sayin’, it’s cute.”

Capwolf reared up to his full height, hackles up and ears forward. “This is... _ cute _ ...to you?”

Stark blanched again. “Ah no, that is actually terrifying, and I will be having nightmares about it. The  _ tail thing _ was cute.”

SHIELD agents returned with trays of raw red meat just in time to change the subject. The thing was, though, none of them really wanted to be the one to bring them to him. Bucky rolled his eyes and volunteered. Yes, he was afraid of Capwolf, if he was perfectly honest, but that never stopped him before and he wasn’t gonna let it now.

They stacked all three trays up in his arms and let him in through the double-vault doors, with Capwolf standing on the far side of the cell. Not that he couldn’t have crossed the gap in a single leap had he wanted. Bucky set the trays down and Capwolf greeted him with another gentle lick from his great rough tongue—then dove facefirst into the meat. Now he understood what it really meant to wolf down one’s food. He reached out to pet Capwolf’s coarse, mane-like neck fur and was met with a growl that made him jump back. Both of them apologised to the other at the same time, but Bucky figured it would be best to let him have his meal alone.

As he turned, Capwolf scooped an arm around his middle faster than thought, and Bucky was not proud of the noise he made. The werewolf growled in his ear, “You smell…good enough...to eat.”

Okay. Alright. Don’t panic. Cold sweat dripped down his spine. “That’s cannibalism, Steve,” he said in as reasonable a voice as he could manage.

Capwolf chuckled. It sounded like boulders shaking. _ Basso profundo _ , his brain supplied, and he didn’t have time to wonder when, why, or how the Winter Soldier would have learned that term. He tucked his muzzle closer, for Bucky’s ears alone. “Not...like...that.”

His breath caught and wow he  _ really _ did not have time to unpack the decided interest his dick was taking in that innuendo, no sir. “Steve,” he admonished, squirming in his lover’s loose grasp, “not a good time for that talk.”

Capwolf grumbled and let him go, returning to his meal while Bucky staggered back out of the cell. Nat and Stark were both staring at him with a bit too much interest.

“Share with the class?” Stark asked, shifting his weight.

“Nnnnope,” Bucky said, popping the “p,” and he went in search of a chair.

By the time he returned, Nat had left, and Stark was being a busybody about the next round of tests being run. Their results were staggering but, Bucky figured, to be expected: even compared to regular Steve, Capwolf had enhanced strength, stamina, and reflex speed, and a frankly somewhat frightening healing factor. He could hear well into the supersonic range. The  _ really _ freaky part was when they tested his olfactory capabilities.

Bucky watched, rapt, as the werewolf breezed through the test and then turned his head to sniff at the now-rattled scientist conducting it. “You’ve had. Beef. Cheese. Bread...burger, with...with egg,” he grated out.

The scientist, stunned, nodded. “That’s...that’s what I had for dinner,” she confirmed.

But Capwolf wasn’t done. “Before that. Greens. Salad. W-with vinegar and.” He sniffed again. “Feta.”

It took a moment for the scientist to confirm again. “Lunch.”

“Before that. More egg. Bread, b-butterrrrry. Croissant, maybe. And.” Sniff, sniff. “Coffee, w-with cream. Honeydew. Grrrapes.” He looked up, amazed with himself, tail thumping. “I can s-smell...what you...had...for breakfast.”

“Incredible,” the scientist laughed breathlessly. “He’s. He’s correct. He’s right! Are you getting this?”

On the other side of the glass, Bucky shook his head a little. He tried to imagine having senses like that—but then remembered what his own senses were like before the knockoff serum, and reckoned it must be similar. More similar, perhaps, to when Erskine’s serum cured Steve’s colorblindness.

There were downsides. Even pulled out of the rage, Capwolf was hot-tempered. At one point the doctors and such were bustling around, talking about him openly, and Bucky shifted nervously as he started piecing together signs of the wolf’s agitation. Ears back, hackles up, eyes wide, and then the growl started. He was about to knock on the glass to warn them when Capwolf wheeled around and barked out with great snapping jaws, “I’m RIGHT HERE!”

Humans scattered like quail. Guards cocked and leveled their tranq guns. Bucky’s fist clanged against the glass and he shouted, “NO!”

With a few moments of having some personal space, Capwolf cooled off. But these incidents punctuated the testing often enough to put the humans on edge. Capwolf didn’t just  _ look _ like a hulking, deadly monster; he had the temperament to match.

No, Bucky realized, it wasn’t a monster’s temper. It was Steve’s own innate, pre-serum, chip-on-the-shoulder prickliness in a monster’s body. His chest swelled with fondness that somewhat tempered his fear.

He was one of the only living people left who ever witnessed Steve before the serum firsthand, though. Everyone else was either accustomed to Captain America, Living Legend, or the reality behind it of Steve Rogers, Fucking Troll. This was terra nova with teeth for everyone else. But for Bucky, figuring out this one thing made the whole insane situation a little more comfortable. He remembered enough of how to deal with Little Steve that surely he could navigate Capwolf instead. He’d just have to be a little more careful, was all. It was one thing when 1935 Steve hit his arm with a fist in a fit of pique. This version of Steve could do a lot more damage.

Bucky pinched his bottom lip between a thumb and forefinger, thinking. He’d have to curb his propensity for teasing Steve, probably. Little Steve had been hit-or-miss with whether he’d take a good ribbing and just give him shit back, or if he’d get all sore and send Bucky into an apologies-and-sweet-talk routine. Capwolf seemed to be the sort to get all sore and try to bite someone in half.

Capwolf caught him staring; his ears pricked forward and his tail thumped a few times. Yeah, Stark was right, that  _ was _ pretty cute, all things considered. The werewolf licked his chops deliberately and gave him a fangy, doglike grin, which was a bit more unsettling than anything. Bucky thought back to what Capwolf had “whispered” in his ear, and he had to adjust how he was standing.

The t-shirt Steve had been wearing before nightfall hadn’t made it, and doctors had helpfully cut the remaining scraps off him earlier, but the sweatpants had enough stretch in them that they’d mostly made it. Capwolf’s thighs were massive enough to have split the side seams, and the bottom elastic had thoroughly obliterated, but his modesty was intact. God help him, Bucky still couldn’t help but wonder what that modesty was hiding, and he immediately felt bad for wondering. Steve didn’t like being a werewolf. The transformation was horrifying and painful. He wasn’t quite himself. Bucky should not be thinking about him like that right now.

Plus, wasn’t it just kinda  _ weird _ when his lover was an actual wolf monster?

_ But it’s still Steve, _ part of his mind protested.  _ And he’s sure looking at  _ you _ that way. _

But it  _ was _ weird.

So was what happened next.

In the course of leaning across Capwolf’s front, a SHIELD scientist’s arm brushed his, and he jerked back yowling in pain. Bucky pounded on the glass. “What happened?!”

“What did you do?!” a second scientist yelled at the first.

“I don’t know!” the first yelled back. “I was just leaning over to switch screens and he started doing that!”

Still growling, Capwolf showed them his forearm, holding it with his other paw-hand. The fur was missing on a strip of it, showing a nasty burn underneath that wasn’t healing—at least not as quickly as the tiny wounds they’d cut in him to test his healing factor earlier in the night.

“BURNS,” he barked.

“What the hell did you touch him with?”

“Nothing, I—” The first scientist looked at her wrist: specifically, the wide bracelet on it. “Silver. It was an accident. But look, Jones, this is silver, he’s allergic to silver.”

Bucky suddenly recalled his reading into werewolf folklore: silver was supposed to kill them. A small, horrible voice in his head wondered,  _ How long till SHIELD starts carrying silver bullets? _

They had a hell of a time convincing Capwolf to test other metals for similar allergies, and Bucky hated himself for it but he was the one to talk him into it. This was need-to-know information. The good news was that all the tests were fruitless. Steel, gold, nickel, brass, bronze, copper, platinum, titanium, nothing else made him react like silver did. It was a cold comfort.

The doctors and scientists resumed the rest of their testing, which largely entailed gathering data and then waiting around for long stretches of time for some machine or another to analyze it. Bucky settled into a brief, restless sleep against the wall again. He woke a few hours later to commotion: Capwolf was changing back.

He shook all over, whining. The sounds of bones popping turned Bucky’s stomach all over again. He lashed out at equipment tables and gurneys in his thrashing. The fur covering his body receded, limbs shrank both in bulk and length; his tail disappeared back into his spine. There was less screaming and roaring this time—it went more quickly than the shift into werewolf form. Bucky watched breathlessly as his lover returned in barely a minute or two. 

Steve immediately grabbed for his pants, which had been stretched so badly they no longer stayed up of their own accord, and promptly fell asleep. Bucky took his lead and reluctantly returned to their suite to get some rest as well.

* * *

He was dreaming, but not conscious of the fact. He was on his back and Steve was on top of him, inside him, with Bucky’s legs wrapped around his waist. Steve took him deep and fast just like he liked it—hitting all the best spots, filling him up. He was pressed into fur: some of it coarse, most of it soft, all of it warmer than a fur rug ever ought to be. It was more like making love against a living thing. Bucky laid his head back with a sigh. Fur brushed his cheeks as he closed his eyes. Steve’s hands pressed against and squeezed the muscular mounds of his chest, and Bucky lifted his own to place upon them—only to find the fingers twisted and gnarled, tipped with claws. He looked down and found Steve’s face obscured by a wolfskin cape and mask, blue eyes staring hotly at him from behind an animal’s face—

Bucky woke with a start. Immediately he reached out and called softly for Steve, then flopped over onto his back with a sigh of frustration when he remembered he was alone. He reached down to rub his groin, found himself hard and aching from the dream that was already starting to fade from his memory.

Now that he was up he couldn’t get back to sleep, not without Steve there; eventually he stopped trying. After a shower and breakfast he tracked down Natasha to do what spies do.

Most of that, as it happened, was research. They watched surveillance tapes from the night before, hoping to see something they’d missed before—some sign of outside interference, anything. They pored over website after website, book scan after book scan. 

Werewolf lore, Bucky discovered, was a nearly global thing. There were stories of shapeshifters from just about every human culture: some malicious, some beneficent, from the undead varcolac of Romania to the charitable wulver of Scotland, from Diné stories of evil skinwalker witches to totemic shamans of Turkey, from  _ varsakkr  _ berserkers to Herodotus’ account of the people beyond Scythia. From what Bucky gathered, there were three common threads: hallucinogens, rabies, and exoticism. Much of what he found was poorly-sourced or not sourced at all, which Nat helpfully explained was internet-speak for “made-up bullshit.”

“I can’t take this anymore,” he said finally, closing out of several dozen tabs on a Starkpad all at once. “You up to spar?”

He went hard on her. Nat was good, and she knew all the old Red Room tricks, but she wasn’t enhanced. It took seeing a flash of real fear in her eyes as she narrowly dodged Bucky’s left fist to realize he wasn’t pulling his punches like he really needed to with anyone who wasn’t Steve or Thor, and in the same moment he also realized she knew he was still sore at her. She gave him a run for his money but barely ten minutes in he made her tap out.

“I need to warm up more first, next time I spar with you,” she panted, generously not mentioning that he had been fighting more like a madman than a sparring partner. Bucky wasn’t even winded. If anything he was wound up, and he took it out on a boxing bag, which he had to consciously try not to destroy. He wondered if this bristling, aimless frustration was what Steve felt before the change—or what kept him so bite-happy as Capwolf.

The rest of the day passed in a daze. Come nightfall, he couldn’t honestly recount how he’d spent all those intervening hours, outside of one useless attempt at a nap. None of it mattered, really. Nothing he did that day was as important as being there in that concrete room, watching his other half spasm and change from behind thick panes of super-strong glass.

Wanda pulled Steve—Capwolf—out of the rage easier this time; he didn’t even pass out from it. 

“Seems you got the knack of it,” Stark praised with a thumbs-up. She shot one back. He then turned to the werewolf with tablet in hand. ”Capwolf, lemme bring you up to speed. We’ve got some preliminary test results in…. Strength increased by a factor of 1.75, stamina by 2.3, blah blah blah, olfactory by about—” He whistled low. “About a hundredfold, eyesight by 20— hey can you still see in color or are you colorblind again like that?”

“I can s-still...see,” Capwolf told him.

“Well that’s good. It’d suck to be all hulked out like that, almost literally I guess, and not be able to see red. Long story short, it’s like you got a super serum on top of the super serum, so, grats on that.”

Capwolf and Bucky both snorted.

“More importantly,” Stark went on, “I’ve got a lead on Gilliam.”

Capwolf and Bucky both perked up.

“We’re sending Barnes and Barton out in the morning. Pity the poor bastard who might have this intel, ‘cause you and I both know what those two are like before noon.” (Bucky flipped him off, which Stark ignored.) “As for the silver thing, it’s not….” He stares at the Starkpad a moment. “Listen, none of my degrees are in medicine so I can’t tell you exactly what all of this means, but it’s not like a normal allergy, at least not when you’re all fuzzy. The test from this morning, that rash you got,  _ that _ was a histamine reaction, but they’re telling me the one from last night was more like you got hit with hydrochloric acid. How’s that looking by the way?”

Capwolf held up his right forearm where he’d been burned. The fur was still missing and the stripe of flesh that had grown over was an angry red. “Hurts less but...still sore. Rash is...gone.”

Stark grimaced. “They’re gonna want to take tissue samples again to see if they can figure out _ why _ a bangle hits you like an acid bath, I know how much you love those. Sorry, can’t be helped.”

“If I rrreally w-wanted to,” Capwolf said darkly, bristling, ears back, “I could...stop them.”

Stark held his hands up with the tablet still in one of them. “Please don’t. I heard about the AIM agents. These are the good guys, Cap, please just try to remember that. The more we know about how this lycanthropy thing works—” He consulted the tablet and rolled his eyes. “Sorry, ‘lycanthropic mutagenic spasm’ thing works, the better we can help you.”

Bucky stirred. “What about that Strange guy? Dr. Strange? Any luck yet?”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a hold of a guy who could be traipsing around on the Astral Plane at any given moment? Fuckin’ hard. Plus cell service is spotty on Tibetan mountaintops, so I’m told.” He gave Bucky what might, on anyone else, have been an apologetic look. “Sorry, Buckminster, nothing yet, but I’m not giving up.”

“An...anything...on yourrr...end?” Capwolf asked Bucky hopefully, complete with swishing tail; but Bucky had to give him an apologetic look of his own.

“Just a bunch’a baloney, sweetheart.” (Capwolf’s head hung at the news even though his tail wagged a little harder at the endearment.) “Not exactly a lotta real werewolves been available for scientific study before now, so it’s all just drugs and folktales. The silver thing didn’t actually show up in werewolf stories till the 19th Century. Everything else is shit like mistletoe and crucifixes.”

“Mistletoe is poisonous to begin with,” Stark snorted, “so that’s kinda rigged.”

Bucky threw his hands up. “Yeah, I mean, it’s mostly lists of how to  _ kill _ werewolves, not _ cure _ them, and most of the shit on those lists would kill a normal person to begin with.”

“No one ever accused _ Malleus Malificarum  _ of being rational or fair,” Stark said wryly.

“Sirs? We’re ready to start,” a scientist butted in. All three of them grumbled. Capwolf stood on the far end of the cell as SHIELD personnel wheeled in the gurney and machinery, preceded once more by armed guards.

“I need to be in there,” Bucky told the lead scientist, a Dr. Crawford, for the third night in a row. “Don’t fuckin’ lock me out again.”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant Barnes,” Dr. Crawford started, “we can’t—”

“Bullshit you can’t. That’s _ my _ boyfriend, and I’m sick and tired of watching youse all treat him like an overgrown lab rat from behind the glass. If he  _ does _ lose control, who in this room do you really think stands the best chance of stopping him, or at least keeping him busy enough that the rest of you can scram?”

The scientist sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “If you can  _ promise _ not to interfere with—”

“Fine, I promise, I’ll stay outta your way. Now get outta mine.” Bucky shouldered past him, waited impatiently at the airlock, and beelined for Capwolf the moment it opened for him.

Capwolf’s eyes lit up and his tail wagged madly at Bucky’s approach. He whined like an overjoyed dog. He sniffed Bucky all over, rumbled happily, and rubbed his giant wolfy face all over him, making Bucky laugh.

“I’m here, big guy,” Bucky murmured. He petted the soft, hot fur of Capwolf’s golden-brown muzzle, the silk of his ears, and sank his fingers into the thick ruffs of his cheeks. Capwolf whined softly and leaned into the contact. Leaning down to kiss his broad forehead, Bucky breathed in the scent of him.

“You still smell like you,” Bucky crooned, petting his face some more. Drier and muskier than usual, like a sweaty day in the desert, but unmistakably Steve.

“You ex-sh-spected...dog,” Capwolf accused playfully.

Bucky snickered. “I mean yeah, can you blame me? They’re gonna let me stay in here this time, but I gotta stay outta their way, that’s the deal.”

Capwolf grunted. “Fine. Just glad you’re...here. You smell  _ so _ good. I could just...sink my teeth...into you.” 

Bucky’s eyebrows rose; he pulled back to meet Capwolf’s eyes and found his gaze burning.

“But I’d rrrather...sink something  _ else _ ...into you,” he growled quietly.

Bucky’s eyes immediately went down to the crotch of that night’s pair of blown-out sweatpants. Capwolf was tenting them impressively. Bucky’s knees went weak all of a sudden and his mouth went dry—both more so when Capwolf delicately licked his neck with that broad, rough tongue. Having those killing teeth so close to his throat sent a thrill through him, blood running hotter, and oh god he found himself wondering what things looked like under those pants—

He didn’t realize he’d whispered it aloud till Capwolf whispered back, “As soon as they...let me out...of here...you’re going to find out.” Bucky sucked in a breath. “First we’ll f-find out what it looks like...and then we’ll find out...how well it fits...inside you.”

Bucky was going to die on the spot.

Capwolf’s knee had found its way between his thighs and started rocking against him. It was strange and wrong but that deep, inhuman rumble—that  _ basso profundo _ —and that  _ tongue _ were conspiring to make his body react _ very _ favorably to the notion.

“Control to Crawford, we’re go for sample collection,” the PA squawked—and Bucky jolted back, cheeks burning with the sudden awareness that they were _ very _ much not alone. He turned away from the too-curious eyes of SHIELD staff to adjust his hard-on.

Bucky cleared his throat and ran a nervous hand through his hair. “I’m just here for moral support tonight. They’ve, uh, they’ve got stuff to do here.”

“I understand,” Capwolf rumbled. But every time Bucky caught him looking for the rest of the night, the werewolf was staring at him like a promise to fuck him in half.

He barely made it through the night. As soon as Capwolf gave way to Steve again and he conked out, Bucky rushed back to their suite and immediately peeled himself out of his clothing. His cock had yet to fully soften even after so many hours and it only took a few moments to bring it back to full mast. His mind swam with terrifying images of Capwolf’s fearsome maw slurping him down. He recoiled from the thought and decided his fist wasn’t enough.

Thank god he’d thought to pack a few of his favorite toys. There was a nice big one about Steve’s size that he’d cheekily custom-ordered in red, white, and blue; it always made Steve flustered to see it, so it was pretty high on the list. Plus it had a suction cup, which in Bucky’s measured opinion was a must for any good solo session.

Impatient as he was, his prep was frankly perfunctory, little more than swabbing himself and the toy with lube after suctioning it to the lip of the bathtub. The stretch burned when he sank down on it. Perfect. He rode it while pumping his cock with his metal hand and tried desperately not to think of his lover as he was the past three nights. But when he came, he came imagining clawed hands pulling his hips down as he sank down on the toy to its very base, and he came imagining the satisfying, goopy heat of Steve spilling inside him.

Bucky rested there for a boneless moment with his asshole still skewed on nearly a foot of wrist-thick silicone. Once he stopped trembling he carefully lifted himself up, and gave both himself and the toy a nice shower before crawling into bed.

He dreamed of running through the woods with a great beast on his heels and couldn’t remember, upon waking, whether or not he’d wanted to get caught.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stariná Volk: Old Wolf  
> pauchok: little spider  
> veliki brat: big brother


	4. One Dog to Another

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Interesting news abounds.

Late morning saw Bucky and Clint, both grumbling and underslept, off to Maryland, leaving Steve behind in the scientists’ care. They didn’t even have to break any bones to get what they came for. Between the two of them, in fact, their mark was comically easy to take in: the moment the man saw that Hawkeye and the Winter Soldier had come for him he tried to run, tripped over his own feet, and started blubbering for mercy.

The man, Franklin, was a subcontractor. He was all too happy to reveal that his crew had been hired on to fabricate large, reinforced vats with viewports; that he didn’t ask questions about what they were for, but figured they were for chemical processing or something; and that the buyer was a guy who called himself T. I. and paid via bank wire from an offshore account.

“Did you meet the guy in person?” Clint asked him.

“No, he had us deliver to an address—I, I’ll give you the address, I’ve got it in, in my ledger,” Franklin offered eagerly. “We only spoke over the phone. He had this, uh, this really high-pitched, funny kinda voice.”

“That’s him,” Bucky said, making a face. “You still got the bank transfer info?”

Franklin gave him a spooked look. “But that’s got _ my _ bank info on it!”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “So redact it, we just want  _ his _ .” He snapped his flesh fingers impatiently, and they watched him like hawks (ha) as he rummaged around for his work ledger.

“This is good,” Clint said once they collected all they could. “We’re gonna turn this in, and if everything checks out, you won’t hear from us again.” They turned to leave.

“What if it doesn’t? I gave you everything I know!” the man whined.

Bucky paused to look over his shoulder. “Then we’ll be back to jog your memory.” And they left him there to quail about it.

_ I feel like that was overkill _ , Bucky signed later in the quinjet’s copilot seat.

_ Nah _ , Clint signed back.  _ Anonymous SHIELD agents hassling citizens breeds conspiracy theories. The Avengers show up and they know it’s serious. _

_ They didn’t need two of us for this. _

Clint shrugged.  _ Safety protocol. It could’ve been a trap and neither one of us is bulletproof. _

Bucky made a face.  _ I know, I’ve caught a few. _

_ Yeah? I haven’t, and I want to keep it that way. Some of us don’t have supersoldier healing. _

Bucky shook his head and patted Clint’s shoulder. It was a fair point. Maybe he’d gotten so accustomed to just being dropped into a location and left to cause mayhem until extraction that he was still having a little trouble wrapping his head around the Avengers way of doing things. Missions weren’t a matter of one person (namely, him) getting shit done with cover fire for support anymore; they hadn’t been since he came in from the cold, and certainly not since he officially joined the team. It was past time for him to stop thinking of the others—and himself—that way.

Clint gave him a long look.  _ And between us, this way we get the intel without SHIELD redactions. _

Bucky scowled. That was _ much _ too good a point, indeed.

But hey, they were a step closer to catching Dr. Interpose, so that brought Bucky’s mood back around. It didn’t take much convincing for Clint to land the quinjet in a field beside a supermarket so Bucky could pick up steaks on the way back to the compound.

Bucky grilled up the meat—rare for Steve, medium-rare for his own—then packed it up with some wine, cheese, and fruit in Tupperware since he hadn’t thought to bring a picnic basket. A cacophony of barking greeted him when he stepped off the elevator to what had become the Werewolf Observation Room. What the….

Steve was awake in the cell, running laps around the inside walls, absolutely _ mobbed _ by dogs. At least he seemed to be having a good time with it. Bucky strolled over, watching Steve jog in circles while half a dozen dogs of various sizes bounded alongside him, each barking and vying for his attention. Bucky whistled for him and Steve made a beeline for him with the pooches trailing close behind. Steve almost didn’t stop, instead of kind of colliding with Bucky and sweeping him up off the ground into a thorough kiss. Bucky swooned, but it was short-lived, on account of all the paws scrabbling at their legs because each dog wanted to be the center of Steve’s attention instead.

“So, dogs like me,” Steve laughed, setting Bucky down. “At least when I’m like this. Scared shitless of the other Steve, though.”

“Dogs have always liked you,” Bucky pointed out.

Steve nodded sideways. “Yeah, but I couldn’t  _ understand _ them, before. Now...watch this.” He raised a hand to the dog-crowd. “Sit!”

Every one of the six dropped their hindquarters immediately. Bucky raised an eyebrow. Impressive, but anyone could train a dog to sit.

“Up!” Steve told them, grinning. The dogs all reared up on their haunches, front paws dangling in the air. “Hop!” They all sprang up in a single leap. Bucky’s other eyebrow rose. Okay, that was more than impressive. “Good,” he praised them, and they promptly turned back into wiggling lick-monsters again.

“Holy shit,” Bucky swore, “so what, you’re like...dog-psychic or something? You can talk to animals now?”

Steve’s own eyebrows went up as he scanned the sky. “I mean. Yeah, kinda, I guess. It’s more of a feeling than like talking to people, you know?”

“I definitely do not know,” Bucky said, laughing silently.

“Ehh, it’s hard to explain. But they treat me like I’m the big dog. These are just dogs that belong to some people who work for SHIELD. You missed it, they brought in a captive wolf to test this out on too.”

That Bucky would have liked to see. “Really, how’d that go?”

Steve grinned—no, he _ beamed _ . “Oh same thing. She was just a big puppy, at least with me. It was like night and day as soon as she smelled me. I didn’t have her doing tricks like these guys but she listened to me, y’know?”

Bucky shook his head slowly. “If this is leading up to you saying we should get a dog, we are gonna have to table that discussion for after we deal with your...thing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve said sadly, petting two dogs at once while two more tried to bump those two out from under his hands so they could get pettings instead. “So how’d the thing in Maryland go with you and Clint?”

“Glad you asked. I’ll tell you over steak?” He lifted the food boxes demonstratively.

Steve perked up. “Thought I smelled something good. This is why I love you best. Lemme turn these knuckleheads over to their owners first. Hey guys, let’s go back!”

A few of the SHIELD agents that had been standing by chattering retrieved their dogs and left with them. Several tried to return to Steve, until he shooed them off to go be with “their people.” 

The only privacy afforded in the cell was a standing curtain hung around a toilet and shower, but the doctors and such had left a few rolling chairs in with the equipment that cluttered the place, so they took those. “So,” Bucky started, “that was wild.”

“You have no idea. They’re smarter than we give them credit for, dogs. Oh, god, Buck, this is so good.”

“Then eat it instead’a talking around it, ya heathen,” Bucky chided him while opening wine. He hadn’t had anything safe to carry glasses in so they’d have to make do with passing the bottle back and forth. “Just like old times.”

Steve glowed. “We should visit France sometime, see how it’s changed. Find out if the wine’s still good.”

“Figure they’ll ever let us off the hook long enough to do that?” Bucky snorted.

“We could steal a quinjet and go AWOL for a weekend,” Steve said with his eyebrows wagging.

Bucky laughed incredulously. “See this is why I’ve got _ no idea _ how people ever got the impression you’re some kinda goody-two-shoes instead of a rabble-rousing, direct-orders-defying, placard-waving Brooklyn punk.”

Steve paused to take a pull of wine. “Must’a been all those propaganda reels we did. You remember those?”

“Pal I watched every one of ’em forty times when I was tryin’ to remember who I was,” Bucky said, wry. A thought occurred to him over a bite of steak, and he snorted again. “Now I’m imagining Capwolf propaganda. ‘Uncle Sam wants YOU for the Lunar Corps!’”

“Har har,” Steve deadpanned. “If I’m being honest I’m not sure they’ll even let me keep being Captain America if I keep changing every night.”

Bucky’s eyes softened on him. “Either that or they’ll send you out like that on purpose. You think the baddies’ goons shit their pants when you come charging in  _ now _ , just wait’ll they get a load of you seven feet tall and furry.”

“Six-five,” Steve corrected. “I am six foot five during a ‘lycanthropic mutagenic spasm.’”

Bucky rolled his eyes so hard they hurt. “Werewolf.”

Steve pointed to himself and said, “Here wolf.”

Bucky _ stared _ . “Steven Grant Rogers, we’re getting a divorce.”

Steve cracked up. “We’re not even married!”

“And now we never will be, because you have just murdered me with how bad that joke was. Bury me, I’m done.” 

Now Steve went all cajoling, and it was harder and harder to keep a smile off his face. As always, Steve eventually won, and then gloated about it.

“No being grouchy at a picnic, it’s not allowed,” he beamed.

“Not even a picnic in a prison cell specifically designed to hold us?” Bucky couldn’t help it. He was bitter.

“ _ Especially _ not then. Never let the bastards get you down,” Steve said in his Captain America voice, just to be a shit again. Damn it, it worked. “So tell me about this lead you found.”

They shared their news of the day: Bucky, about Maryland, and Steve, about test results. In addition to the dogs-and-wolves weirdness, they had ruled out the influence of direct or refracted sunlight, seeing as how the changes had been taking place underground; and they’d mostly ruled out solar influence altogether as a function of timing. The running theory was lunar gravity, owing to the fact that the changes had consistently occurred right at moonrise and moonset.

“Werewolf ruled by the moon, groundbreaking,” Bucky deadpanned around a mouthful of cheese. 

Steve made a dreary face. “You know that’s not what they’re calling it.”

Bucky snorted. “They can call it a bunch of bullshit fancy science words all they fuckin’ want. You’re a werewolf and you change with the moon. It’s cut an’ dry.”

Steve could only shrug. “I don’t disagree. And I gotta wonder now how many other things from folklore are true. But like you said before, most of it’s concerning either how to turn into one or how to kill one, so I’m not real eager to test them out.”

A SHIELD agent tapped on the glass. “Sergeant Barnes. Director Fury is looking for you. He says it’s urgent.”

“Oh shit, fuck me, the debrief!” Bucky kissed Steve soundly and gathered up the Tupperware. “He’s gonna skin me alive. I gotta go.”

Steve cursed too. “You big yutz, I wouldn’t’a sat here yapping your ear off if I’d’a known you hadn’t debriefed yet. Tell him it was my idea, he can’t stay mad at me.”

Bucky gave him a look of deep gratitude, because Fury could sure as hell stay mad at _ him _ . “Thanks babe. See you tonight.”

* * *

  
He escaped the late debriefing with only eight solid minutes of being yelled at, and he took that as a win. Fury was, well, furious with him, but still for some reason allowed him to attend the anticipated change that evening.

Only...the change didn’t happen. Steve remained human the whole night through.

Not that this meant any fewer tests, though, Bucky discovered with no small amount of agitation; nor did it mean they released him from quarantine. The only result he caught was the one that caused the most stir: the signs of infection that had been present since Steve came to medical the day before the first change were completely, utterly gone.

“So you mean I beat it?” Bucky heard Steve ask hopefully.

The scientists glanced around at each other before one of them said gently, “We don’t know that for certain. The closest thing we have to literature on the subject indicates it’s a recurring thing. I’m sorry, Captain, we still need to keep you another night, just in case.”

Bucky blew out a sigh, put his back to the glass wall, and slid down it till he was seated on the floor. Just their fucking luck. He was sick and tired of sleeping alone, not getting shit for rest and waking up in a panic because Steve wasn’t there. He was sick with worry about his lover and just...suddenly run down by it. He wasted hour after hour half-listening to the hubbub around him, half dicking around on his phone. They wouldn’t let him inside this time; fair enough, after the shit he pulled on Fury earlier in the day. But it felt like a punishment for Steve as much as for himself, and Bucky _ really _ didn’t like that part.

He dozed at some point out of sheer boredom. He must have, because he snorted himself awake at someone speaking over the PA. He checked his phone: it was just about dawn; and to his unspeakable relief, they were finally letting Steve go.

The poor man had bags under his eyes. “I cannot fucking wait to lie down in a real bed. With you. Naked.”

That’s all it took for Bucky’s mind to turn dirty. “Hey so, that reminds me,” he said, pitched low just for Steve. “Did you ever find out um. What things look like down there?”

Steve’s eyes glinted. “Not exactly. Things definitely _ feel _ different and the x-rays showed a bone—”

“A _ bone?! _ ”

“Ssh, Bucky, yes, a bone—”

“Like a literal _ boner? _ ”

“God, are you twelve? Stop giggling, they’re looking at us. I wouldn’t let ‘em take my pants off.” He gave Bucky a wicked smirk. “I was hoping you’d do the honors instead.”

Bucky bit his lower lip. “Why wait?”

They shared a grin, and went in search of the first restroom they could find to lock themselves inside.

Bucky backed Steve into the wall without a shred of hesitation. They kissed, more teeth than lips, and Bucky hit his knees so hard it actually kinda hurt a bit, not that it was any kind of deterrent. He yanked Steve’s sweatpants down just far enough to free his dick and swallowed him down in one go.

Oh god, he was in heaven. Steve’s scent and taste overwhelmed him, filling up his senses, with Steve’s groans rounding out the experience. He deep-throated his lover for all he was worth—then guided Steve’s hands to his head and gave his hips a tug. It was a familiar gesture: _ pull my hair and fuck my mouth _ . And bless him, Steve did. The sting of having his hair used as reins crashed into the abrupt stretch of Steve’s length plunging his throat. Bucky’s own cock was hard as rock and he took himself in hand while Steve had his way with him.

“Buck, oh god Buck, I’m not gonna last honey, I’m gonna come,” Steve panted. “Can I come in your mouth, sweetheart? Can I come in your pretty mouth?”

Bucky hummed his consent, garbled by the enthusiastic facefucking he was receiving, but the message came across loud and clear. Steve fucked Bucky’s mouth right through orgasm, punching his come down into Bucky’s spasming, swiftly-swallowing throat. Bucky groaned with every little breath he managed to draw. Two thick mouthfuls of semen down the hatch. He sucked Steve clean and kissed the tip.

“Good boy. I’m not done with you yet,” Steve growled—and lifted a yipping Bucky bodily off the ground. He put his lover down bent over the lavatory counter, made short work of his pants to get them down around his muscular thighs, and kicked Bucky’s feet apart. Bucky groaned and wiggled happily as Steve slapped his ass a few times.

Liquid soap makes terrible lube, but that’s all they had to work with at the moment, so it would have to do. Bucky cried out as Steve shoved two wet fingers right up his ass and went to town stretching him open.

“You’ve been practicing without me,” Steve crooned, biting up and down Bucky’s neck.

“Knew they—ah!—couldn’t keep you in there forever,” Bucky sighed. He spread his legs as far apart as his pants would let him and rolled his hips to help fuck himself on Steve’s fingers. “It’s never as good without you there, baby.”

No one else (save _ maybe _ Natasha) would have believed it in a million years, but Captain America could talk as dirty as any porn star when he got riled up. “Jerk your cock and watch yourself in the mirror, Buck. That’s it, just like that. Look at that, so pretty for me.” Steve reached around with his free hand to pinch and roll Bucky’s nipples and knead his pecs. “You like it big, sweetheart?” Bucky nodded. “You need your pussy spread open wide?”

“Yeah,” Bucky mewled.

“Beg for another finger, baby.”

Bucky shook all over, sweating, drooling from the cock. “Please, sir, please give me another, I need more, please I need something bigger in my ass, oh please—”

“So good for me.” Steve kissed his shoulders and pinched a nipple hard as he shoved a third finger up Bucky’s hole. “Bet I could get my whole fist up there. Would that be big enough for my little sweetheart?” Bucky nodded and gasped; his hips bounced faster at the thought. “My little size queen, taking it so well. Has my size queen been thinking about the wolf?”

Bucky’s mind went blank as Steve leaned in close and growled, “The wolf’s been thinking about you. You smell so good, baby. Like blood and candy and leather, like something I wanna lick up and swallow whole. You been thinking about getting fucked into the ground by the Big Bad Wolf?”

Four fingers now, and Bucky was whimpering nonstop. It would probably surprise no one that the Winter Soldier could talk a blue streak, too. “Yes, sir,” he admitted with a sob. “Oh god Steve I’ve been thinking about it every night—I can’t fuckin’ wait for these stuffy SHIELD bastards to let, ah, ahh, us go ho-oommme so I can spread my, ah, my legs and get that big long tongue on my cock and in my pussy, oh fuck yeah Steve right there, wanna find out how big that Big Bad Wolf really is!”

By that point Steve was hard against his thigh again, and Bucky begged for it like he was starving. Steve pulled his fingers out and drove his cock inside in their place with a single punch of his hips, and Bucky was the one howling then. Steve seized his hips hard and fucked him  _ sightless _ .

Bucky came hard enough to stripe the mirror, and damn near came again when he felt the wet spread of Steve’s come coating his depths. They twisted to kiss lazily, rocking together until their cocks both softened enough that Steve slipped out of Bucky’s ass, kissing even as they cleaned up after themselves.

They stumbled their way back to the residential building, had a nice hot shower with a nice hot makeout session, and passed the fuck out tangled in each other’s limbs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jeez, guys, get a room.


	5. Do Not Fuck the Werewolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.

Bucky woke to an insistent buzz from the nightstand. That was his “This shit’s important” ringtone going off. He groped for his phone and groaned when he saw the notification. 

**11:37**

**New Message from Fury**

**My office. Now.**

“I gotta head in,” he grumbled, carefully extracting himself from Steve’s octopus-like grasp.

“No, stay,” Steve whined sleepily and tightened his grip around Bucky’s middle.

Bucky sighed. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I gotta. It’s Fury. He sounds mad.”

“He’s always mad.”

“Yeah, but not always at me.” He kissed Steve’s palm after peeling the hand away. “Back soon, I promise.”

He debated making a cup of joe first, but Sensible Bucky was just awake enough to remind him how much worse it would be to walk into that office late with a coffee in hand. He might as well rollerskate in and say “I don’t think this is important.” So he went without coffee, which meant he was still only mostly awake when he got there, and was thus woefully unprepared: the worst possible thing to be around Nick Fury.

To make matters worse, his ass was still wet and sore. Every step was a reminder of how Steve had fucked him stupid just a few hours before. Normally this would be a great thing, but under these circumstances it was a distraction he couldn’t afford. Even two years into Bucky’s recovery, Fury still kept him dancing on edge with that whole “shooting him through a wall and forcing him to fake his own death” thing he did while in Hydra’s grasp. Fury’s office was not a place where pleasant conversations took place.

And sure enough, the moment the office door closed behind him, Fury lit into him.

“What in the hell were you thinking?”

Bucky froze in place, wide-eyed. “Could...could you clarify?”

Fury was looking at him like he’d grown a second head. “I have Patient Zero under twenty-four-hour surveillance and supervision trying to find out what in god’s name is actually wrong with him, and your idea of helping the situation is to have sex with him?!”

Bucky’s cheeks burned and spine went cold—then immediately he got his back up about it. “That— that is a private matter between me and my partner,  _ sir! _ ”

“And,” Fury said, “the seventeen SHIELD personnel who had to hear it happening.”

Oh. Oh shit. That restroom...was pretty close to the cell, wasn’t it. If a hole could just open up in the ground and swallow Bucky right about that moment that’d be great. But he was too much of a soldier to do anything but keep his back and shoulders straight and eyes forward. He couldn’t look Fury in the face so the far wall had to suffice.

“Did you even use protection?” Fury demanded.

Bucky gave him a scandalized look. “With all due respect, sir, that’s none of your business. Not like I’m gonna get pregnant.”

Fury only got louder. “It is my damn business when we don’t even know if what Cap has is communicable! What part of ‘Patient Zero’ did you not understand, Barnes? Did it not occur to you what kind of a SNAFU it’d be dealing with _ two _ out-of-control supersoldiers at one time? And for your own damn sake did you forget that that arm is anchored in your spine and half your ribcage?”

Bucky went cold again as Fury laid it on the line. “If you went through the same kind of transformation Cap has been going through, that arm could tear you apart from the inside. And this was less important to you than getting your  _ fucking _ rocks off?!”

A tiny, incongruously-pleased voice in the back of Bucky’s head crowed,  _ He’s worried about me. _

Fury put his hands on his desk. “Now Barnes, there are not a lot of things left in this world that surprise me.  _ You _ surprise me, and I don’t count that as a good thing. It _ surprises _ me that I find myself having to tell somebody,  _ do not. Fuck. The werewolf. _ ”

Bucky opened his mouth to say something but Fury cut him off with a pointing finger. “A-ah! DO  _ NOT _ . FUCK. THE WEREWOLF!”

“Understood, sir,” Bucky said, subdued. “I’ll go get tested now.”

“Damn right you’re gonna go get tested! DISMISSED!”

Bucky quick-stepped it back to the labs.

* * *

Getting his results back would take hours, they told him. Steve had been brought back in for study yet again, so Bucky split his time between fiddling restlessly with his phone on a foyer couch and practicing with throwing knives. The latter he did with Stark watching from a distance. More than once he thought to himself,  _ I should go talk to him,  _ but each time he pushed the thought away.

Stark made Bucky melancholy. They rarely went on missions together, and never without Steve there as a buffer. Out of the field his company was even more sparse. He had a tendency to stare at Bucky broodily as if weighing the Winter Soldier’s sins against Bucky Barnes’s damaged old heart. As far as Bucky was concerned, he deserved every dirty look.

So now he was broody. His mulling turned from Stark to lycanthropy. To Capwolf’s piteous  _ I don’t want to be like this. _ To the agonizing screams of transformation, and the mindless, ravening rage when it first took hold. It was a loss of control, a loss of self. Could Bucky take that again? Losing control like that, losing his mind and self like that, becoming someone—some _ thing _ else entirely?

_ And I’ve been jerking off to that, _ he thought guiltily. 

And then there was the cyborg thing. Capwolf’s arms were a good bit different from Steve Rogers’ arms. The shoulders were further forward and the proportions were off. If it were him, if it were Bucky changing, surely the arm would tear him apart from the inside just as Fury warned. There would be a sick poetic justice, he thought miserably, if the weapon Hydra forced on him as part of his new life as their puppet was the very thing that took him out for good. Would it kill him? Or would he be damned to transform, rip asunder, heal, transform, rip, heal, transform, rip, heal, for the rest of his life?

His stomach curdled. That thought made him more afraid than he wanted to admit.

Selfishly, he brooded on the idea of losing the intimacy of barebacking with Steve: of never wrapping his lips directly around the silky steel of his cock again, never feeling the gratifying mess of Steve’s come dripping down his insides. Maybe even never kissing with tongue.

That, as terrible as it would be, would be the least of his worries. Plenty of couples used protection all the time, he reassured himself, for all sorts of reasons. At least it would make cleanup easier. It wouldn’t be all bad. (It would be awful.) (He was being narrow-minded and selfish.)

He was still brooding, looking at his phone without really seeing it, when Wanda came by and stood behind his couch. He knew she was there, but even still, when she reached over to stroke and toy with his hair, he flinched. To tell her it was okay to continue he leaned towards her hand, then.

Nat did this sometimes, when he wasn’t sore at her like he still was then. That must have been where Wanda picked it up from, watching her, but they’d still been at arm’s length ever since Capwolf’s first appearance. Allowing casual touch was something he can  _ do _ now, even if he was still careful not to let on how touch-starved he really was. If he could let his guard down ever, everyone around him would know that he was aching to have gentle hands on him  _ all the time _ , now that he knew people could touch him without hurting him.

But this was fine. This was a good compromise, to sit still and let the girl play with his hair, to comb and braid and unbraid and twist and smooth it. It felt wonderful, and he didn’t have to look like anything other than patient.

“This must be hard for you,” Wanda said gently.

Bucky didn’t know what to say to that, so he just kinda grunted.

“Obviously,” she went on, “it’s hard on Steve, but when you love someone, their pain is your pain. But at the same time, their strength can be your strength, and vice versa, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed softly. “Steve’s a scrapper. Always has been, whether he’s a ninety-pound shrimp or a goddamn werewolf.”

Wanda nodded and fell silent. For a nice little while, they were quiet together, just keeping each other’s company with her fingers in his hair. _ Grooming is a basic allosocial behavior, _ Bucky remembered from...some source he ironically couldn’t recall.

She was finishing a careful fishtail braid when she spoke again. “I have an idea of how to help him.”

“I’m all ears,” he said sleepily, phone long since abandoned, but roused himself some. “Is it anything like how you helped me? Y’know...rooting around in my mindscape, undoing the connections the Chair made?”

Wanda hummed. “Almost the opposite. The idea is that I will try to help him create a mental barrier against the rage state. I don’t know if it will work….”

“But it’s better than sitting around waiting for a bunch of whitecoats to come up with madder science than what turned him in the first place,” Bucky finished.

“Yes,” she nodded. “Not that I do not have faith in SHIELD—” Bucky snorted; she petted his head soothingly. “But we should try as many angles as we can. Steve is strong. I know how strong his mind and will are. I believe he can do it, if it can be done.”

Bucky reached over his shoulder to lace his fingers with hers. More quietly, she added, “It’s okay if you’re scared. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Don’t read my mind,” he grumbled at her.

Wanda petted him again and said, “I didn’t have to.”

* * *

Not long after that, a SHIELD nurse came out into the lobby. “Sergeant Barnes,” she called, “we have your results.”

Drawing in a deep breath, Bucky patted Wanda’s hand where it rest on his shoulder and rose to face the music. “Lay it on me,” he said in the exam room.

“All negative.” 

He deflated in relief, letting go of the breath he’d been holding.

“However,” the nurse pressed on, “that isn’t a guarantee that the mutagenic spasms aren’t transmissible, so you should take care to eliminate all fluid exchange with Captain Rogers for now. At least until we have proof one way or the other.”

Steve pouted about it when Bucky brought him the news. “We can’t even kiss with tongue?” he griped. “It’s like the 30s and 40s all over again!”

Bucky bumped his shoulder. “Yeah, only instead’a risking arrest we’re risking both of us being werewolves.”

“Who would have thought gay sex could be so risky,” Steve said wryly.

“Oh, pal, remind me to tell you some stories from the 80s sometime,” Bucky huffed.

Steve shakes his head. “I’ve read about it. In all seriousness, I wouldn’t wish this on you, sweetheart. Least of all being a lab rat. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be cooped up when I’m the wolf and all I wanna do is go outside and run around all night.” He laid his forehead against Bucky’s. “Whatever we need to do, it’s fine. I’m with you no matter what.”

“Same here.” Bucky gave him a chaste little kiss and did not mention Fury’s concerns about the arm. Steve had enough to worry about as it was.

* * *

Moonrise came with everyone standing at the ready: Bucky and Wanda, Stark and Nat, doctors and scientists and tranq-bearing guards. But for the second night in a row Steve remained human, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. They kept Steve under watch the whole night—finally foregoing more tests, as they had mountains of data to analyze as it was—but eventually he just curled up and went to sleep on the floor.

From what Bucky gathered from eavesdropping on whitecoats, this moved the full moon theory into top position. Lunar gravity was waning with the face of the moon so it must have no longer been strong enough to activate the change. There was some quibbling about the _ gravity _ part of the hypothesis, given there were no differences coinciding with tidal changes, but they didn’t have answers for what else it was about the moon that triggered Steve’s “spasm.”

Bucky loved science, he really did. Since coming back to himself he’d gleefully leaned into “nerd” as an identifier. But he’d seen enough weird shit to think the problem was they were trying to use science to solve a non-scientific problem.

On the other hand, it was a mad scientist that did this, so there was a non-zero chance that there was some sort of advanced alien artifact behind it all. Something left over from the Chitauri invasion maybe, or a long-buried relic of visitors from other worlds.

As Steve slept, Bucky found himself trying to access the files on what cleanup had recovered from Dr. Interpose’s lab. Much of it was redacted or just plain unknown. He found an entire catalog of chemicals they’d seized: most of them were marked “composition unknown.” After an hour or two he gave up and went to bed.

The following morning Bucky got the news he’d been waiting for for days: they were letting Steve out of quarantine! He still had to stay on the compound grounds, and under watch, but that was a damned sight better than being cooped up in a big glass cell. It was no surprise whatsoever that he wanted nothing to do with the indoors all day—so he and Bucky took long, meandering walks around the compound, occasionally jogging for the sheer trollish joy of making their SHIELD-appointed tail’s day a little harder. They even took their meals outside. Someone (they suspected Stark) had sprung to have a food truck come all the way out there to the compound, so they gorged themselves on magnificently greasy pizza under the shade of ancient trees.

It was a good thing they finished the last of their lunch when they did, because someone showed up walking their dog shortly thereafter. Bucky recognized the big German shepherd as one of the dogs that had been used to test Steve’s bizarre connection with them.

“Did she tell you her name?” the owner asked, grinning. He was a decent-looking, well-built young man who looked like he joined SHIELD right out of his first tour of duty, and Bucky knew from mountains of experience that he was a little starstruck.

Steve looked up from where he was playfully sparring with the dog. “I don’t think they have names like ours. They have personal smells instead.”

Bucky and the agent both looked at him in surprise. “Really? She comes when I call her, so I know she knows I mean her when I say Greta,” the agent said. The shepherd looked at him and he beamed. “There, see!”

Steve chuckled. “Hi Greta. Hi. Good girl. I meant for each other. I still couldn’t tell you exactly how I know what they’re saying, or how they understand me—”

Greta grumbled happily, and Steve cracked up, tossing his hands up. “I’m a dog, she says. Yeah I guess that’s partway true now, huh.”

“With all due respect, Captain, I bet the dog handlers would love to put this new skill of yours to use,” the agent said.

Steve shared a glance with Bucky that meant  _ fat chance in hell of that, pal _ , and put his hand out. “What’s your name, son?”

For a moment the young man looked like he forgot. “Amos, sir. Field Agent George Amos, Weapons Division. It’s an honor for both of us—me and Greta I mean.”

They shook hands, then Amos proffered his to Bucky too, who took it after Steve elbowed him.

“You know who we are,” Bucky said, earning himself another elbow.

“Greta’s a hell of a dog, and she respects you,” Steve said. “You two should visit us in the city sometime.”

Amos’s grin became so delirious it must have hurt his cheeks. He seemed to hear the dismissal just fine, though. “Yes sir, love to. We’ll let you two get on with your day. Captain. Sergeant. Greta, come.”

“Good kid,” Steve said once Amos was out of earshot.

“That ‘kid’ ain’t much younger than us, old man, if you don’t count the time we were on ice,” Bucky pointed out; then he sighed. “Everybody’s got an angle. Something they want outta you.”

Steve shrugged and pulled Bucky close; he sank to the ground with Bucky in his lap. “Mixed blessing. You know I like being useful. The fact that I  _ can _ be so useful now means a lot more demand for that use.”

Bucky leaned up to kiss his chin. “Just save a little bit for me, lover boy, that’s all I ask.”

Steve nuzzled his face and kissed the cleft of Bucky’s chin right back. “Shucks, Buck, you know you’ll always get the lion’s share.”

They napped together in dappled sunlight till the night’s approach forced them to rise and return to the cell.

* * *

Once again he didn’t change. Bucky had it out with a few doctors and finally,  _ finally _ got his way: they released Steve from quarantine altogether, with stern warnings to check in daily and tell them as soon as anything out of the ordinary occurred.

The two of them couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It was hard, remembering they couldn’t kiss how they liked, and there were a few close calls followed by grumbling. Their attention was easily diverted back to worshipping each other’s bodies with chaste lips and bold hands.

“Do we have condoms?” Steve asked, gaze burning.

Bucky winked at him and opened a bedside drawer. Steve boggled at the mound of foil packets inside. “Fun fact I learned, apparently hookups between SHIELD agents are common enough that medical stocks a shitload of these.”

Steve threw his head back and laughed. “Just like the Army. The more things change….”

“The more I want you all the same,” Bucky crooned. He held a condom wrapper by the corner in his teeth, and tugged Steve towards the bed by the hem of his pants, walking backwards. They’d barely been past the door when they got their shirts and shoes off. Now, sinking into the bed, they peeled each other out of their pants as well.

“God I wanna put my mouth on that,” Bucky huffed, mouthing at Steve’s cock through his boxer briefs as soon as Steve had him out of his—the website had called them “boy shorts;” Bucky just called them cute.

Steve groaned and petted Bucky’s hair. “I know, babe, I want it too. But we gotta be safe.”

“I know, I know.” Bucky slipped Steve’s underwear down his thighs and then off entirely. He smooched the top of one foot, then Steve’s shin, then knee, up his thigh, finally right on the tip of his cock where his glans peeked out of his foreskin. He unwrapped the condom, arranged it onto the tip of Steve’s cock, and rolled it down...with his mouth.

“ _ Where _ did you learn to do  _ that?! _ ” Steve gasped.

“Porno,” Bucky winked up at him. “Y’like that, babe?”

Steve sounded like the air had been punched out of him. “Yeah. God I’m so ready to be inside you. You need to stretch?”

Bucky shook his head. “I’m good. Just need some lube. Nightstand, your right. Can I ride you?”

“Be my guest.” Steve held up his hands to help steady Bucky. He let Bucky set the pace: slow and tender, breaching him gently but neither of them pausing at all. His hands roved up and down Bucky’s sides from ribs to thighs. 

Bucky sighed in silent pleasure. He’d actually grown to miss this side of Steve—the feather-light touches, the reverence of his hands, the way he handled Bucky like he was something priceless, the way he took control so Bucky could let go. It made him feel beautiful like nothing else could.

“Love you so much,” he crooned as he slid up and down with aching slowness. Steve murmured his own adoration and rolled his hips up to meet him on the way down. God, he loved this, loved being full to bursting with this man, split open, body invaded. Steve was hard as a steel rod inside him and hot even through latex. 

After a few minutes the sting of stretching subsided. Bucky let himself go a little faster, spurred on by Steve wrapping a lubed hand around his cock. Steve whispered encouragement to him and he whispered back. It didn’t really mean anything, what they were saying; just sharing their enjoyment of each other’s bodies in quiet, filthy ways. Bucky loved it when Steve talked dirty. There was no Captain America in his voice when he told Bucky to bounce on his cock. This part of Steve was for him and him alone.

This thought helped bring him to climax, a fair bit later when they were both sweaty and shaking from the efforts of making love. Knowing Steve Rogers was his, knowing Steve let Bucky into the secret parts of himself just like Bucky let Steve inside his body, was an intoxicating thing. He felt drunk on it all: on sex, on love; and he came with Steve’s name on his lips like a prayer.

Steve paused then, petting Bucky while letting him come down. But he didn’t let go of his hips. Instead he gave Bucky his moment to breathe and then pulled him down hard on his cock with a grin for Bucky’s gasp and cry. Slow, deep, and hard, he manipulated Bucky’s hips and pumped his own to fuck his lover so hard but sweet he had Bucky crying out with nearly every thrust. Bucky’s cock perked up again; he moved to squeeze it with his right hand, but Steve pushed it away.

“Nuh-uh, other one,” Steve told him.

Bucky laughed breathlessly and switched hands. So maybe Steve had a bit of a thing for the metal arm. Thinking of it in a sexual context was still a strange and slightly unsettling thing, but Bucky practiced, and the truth was there  _ was _ something “different in a good way” about warm metal on his most sensitive skin—his cock, balls, and hole all got attention from his metal hand. So it was now, too, and Steve watched him do it hungrily.

Bucky didn’t last as long the second time, not with Steve slamming into him like that. Fuck but that was a big dick. It always filled him with a sense of pride knowing he could take that big of a cock to the hilt up his ass. This time his orgasm was a slightly more violent thing ripping through him with a “Yeah yeah yeah oh  _ fuck _ ” to announce his coming. And Steve wasn’t far behind, not pausing at all this time but fucking up into Bucky’s slick, stretched hole and grunting praise for Bucky as he spilled.

They rocked together for a moment while they softened, as usual. There was a twinge of loss that he couldn’t feel Steve’s semen wetting up his insides—just the remnants of their lube. On the other hand, when it came time to clean up, it  _ was _ easier.

Steve tossed their abandoned underwear into a hamper, trashed the condom wrapper, and stowed the lube, then finally let himself flop down on the bed. Bucky cozied up to him and traced the lines of his muscles with his fingertips.

“So,” he smirked, “we gonna have someone make jumbo-sized condoms for Capwolf too?”

Steve’s face went red as if he hadn’t been speaking like a porn star within the very hour. “You’re serious about that, huh?”

Bucky looked down. “I mean. It’s pretty weird, but...you’re always interested, and I’ve gotten curious.”

Steve sucked in his lips to chew them. “I think they’d have to be pretty big. And shaped funny.”

Bucky’s eyes widened. “Shaped funny how?”

“You haven’t seen the MRIs, have you,” Steve said. Bucky shook his head. “Do that tomorrow. Then if you’re still interested, we can see. ...Of course, we’re talking like it’s gonna happen again. ...It’s probably gonna happen again.” He sighed; Bucky played with his hair, which seemed to soothe him. “Might as well make the best of it, right?”

Bucky kissed the tip of his nose. “Thus, werewolf condoms.”

He got tickled for his trouble.

Bucky slept soundly that night, finally once more in his lover’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky’s conclusions about safe sex are correct. If your safety is on the line, don’t take chances. If you hook up often, always have protection available, and get tested regularly.


	6. Dr. Strange, Real Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky & co. get some answers, but only some.

Steve and Bucky did exactly fuck-all for about a week following the former’s release from quarantine. Upstate New York was beautiful that time of year; why not enjoy it? They were doing exactly that in a copse outside the compound when Steve’s phone rang.

It was Stark. “Hey Cap. Barnes. Sorry to interrupt your little interlude but I need you here pronto. Think you’re gonna want to be present for this.”

“Tony,” Steve said, “what’s up?”

“Dr. Stephen Strange is on the line in the war room.”

Steve and Bucky exchanged a look. “We’ll be right there.”

Projected on the wall in a video call, Dr. Strange certainly looked the part of a wizard, if wizards just had to exist: a serious-looking East Asian man with an Atlantic accent, greying temples, and a Van Dyke that would make Stark proud, dressed in what appeared to be a flashy red cape. Bucky was half-surprised that he was appearing to them over an internet video call service instead of as a vision in smoke or something. The future was unbearably weird.

“—Don’t know who the Kree are, I suggest doing some internal research,” Dr. Strange was saying when Bucky and Steve walked in. “Ah, there they are. A pleasure to meet you, Captain, and my condolences on your affliction.”

Steve nodded. “Thanks. Pleased to meet you too. Tony says you might know a thing or two about that.”

“I do. Not a lot, but I do,” Dr. Strange confirmed. “I went through what lore I could find and consulted with a few knowledgeable individuals. Most of what I know, you probably know by now too.”

Steve gestured toward him. “Anything you have is potentially useful. Please, go on.”

“Thank you, Captain. There’s the transformation itself, which happens when the moon is full; the werewolf is stronger and faster than humans, which must be _ truly _ impressive starting from your baseline, ruled by instinct, and exceedingly rare.”

Sam piped up with, “You’re right, that is stuff we’ve found out. Is it contagious?”

“When they’re created by magic, yes, it spreads by bite in wolf form, but the ones created by other means aren’t known to transmit lycanthropy.”

The room looked hopeful. “What about the rage?”

“The rage.” Dr. Strange took a moment to parse the question. “There is a bloodlust that they go into when they change, yes. No one knows exactly, but my opinion as a man of science” (“What,” Bucky said quietly) “is that it’s purely metabolic. The energy requirements for simple mitosis is high when you’re talking about healing a wound; changing the structure of the entire body would take a tremendous amount of energy. Take a being that’s starving for fuel and give it the instincts of a predator, and the only thing on its mind is going to be finding something to eat.”

Steve folded his arms, disquieted. Bucky thought back to the humongous meals of the nights and following days Steve had changed. That tracked. _ Make the hunger stop _ , Capwolf had said.

“Some of the lore mentions werewolves being charmed into submission. Tony has told me about what the young Miss Maximov has accomplished in your case, so I suppose that it’s true, albeit without the benefit of a magic flute.”

Wanda snickered. Bucky snorted. Stark spoke: “Here’s the big question you know is coming: what turned him, and how do you turn him back?”

“That’s two questions but I’ll answer anyway,” Dr. Strange said, and Bucky finally decided he liked the guy. “As to what can make a werewolf—there are spells that would do it, but it would take an accomplished sorcerer, and that kind of magic is rare in a world where magic, real magic, is rare to begin with. I did find one book that claimed there are two rare herbs, hirasu and sitsuie, that could cause the change in combination.”

Stark made an aside to FRIDAY to pull all the data she could find on hirasu and sitsuie, and prepare a report.

“As for a cure….” Dr. Strange leaned back and made a moue. “I have to point out that those who come into contact with werewolves have, historically, done so in a kill-or-be-killed situation, so all of the literature points to death as the most commonly acceptable cure, preferably by silver.”

“It isn’t fucking  _ acceptable _ this time,” Bucky snapped. Steve put a steadying arm around his side, which he leaned into. Even Stark looked dour.

“I already got rid of all my silver shit just for when he visits,” Sam snarked; “we’re aiming for him  _ not _ to die here.”

Dr. Strange sighed and took on the air of someone who was trying to be understanding, the way an ER doctor is understanding of someone whose loved one just died on the table. “If magic was the cause, then magic could also be the cure, even though I don’t know offhand of any restorative spell that would do the trick. Hypothetically, if the Captain were to study the Arts himself, he might become capable of controlling the change and shifting from one form to another at will.”

Steve made a face like he smelled roadkill. Bucky elbowed him. “What, Steve, you don’t wanna be a wizard?”

Dr. Strange held up his hands. “You asked for ideas.”

Natasha, who had been characteristically quiet up till then, leaned forward. “What if it  _ wasn’t _ magic? What if it was mad science, or those herbs you mentioned, or anything else?”

The sorcerer thought about that for a moment. More than anything, he looked like he was trying to formulate bad news in the most digestible way. “Then curing it would be like curing cancer or cerebral palsy: hypothetically possible, but no one has that science yet.”

Stark set his jaw like he just took a personal challenge. “Yet.”

If only Banner was around, too, surely the two of them would find a way.

Bucky felt a rush of gratitude that the man cared so much about Steve. That all of them did. Even if they couldn’t find the answer, it was good to know so many people cared enough to ask.

* * *

That was that for a while.

Steve found a reprieve from being a lab rat while actual rats, along with several other species, took his place. SHIELD’s prevailing concern was transmission. From what Bucky gathered, the endless tests aimed to determine if Steve’s blood, saliva, or nails could infect others. He knew this much because he got to hear the outraged rant when they wanted to test Steve’s semen as well. Bucky was the sole recipient of that. And as soon as they were informed that the tests had all come back negative, they saw to it that he received several doses.

The research was far from over, though. The big thing, of course, was figuring out a cure—everyone was running on the assumption that the transformation would happen again the next time the moon was full.

“Word on the street is,” Bucky panted to Natasha after a training session one day, “SHIELD just dumped a ton of money into a program to finding some way to block Capwolf from coming out entirely.”

Nat peered at him. “That wasn’t SHIELD, it was Tony.” At his dumbfounded expression, she went on, “He didn’t tell you, did he?”

Bucky raised an eyebrow at her. “When does he ever? We’re not exactly close. But wow.”

“It’s not just you. Tony has a habit of doing things for people quietly so he doesn’t feel like he’s doing it for publicity, and because shows of gratitude make him squirm,” she said.

Bucky thought about that for a moment. “I would’ve expected the opposite. He seems like the kind of guy to lord things over people.”

The side of Nat’s mouth twitched, not quite a smirk. “Not when he’s doing something to be nice. Genuine emotions make him uncomfortable.”

“Huh.” Bucky chewed his lip over it. “So wait, he  _ wants _ people to think he’s just a shallow jackass?”

Nat just quirked her eyebrows and headed for the lockers.

Well damn. But the more Bucky thought about it, the more it made sense, or at least he thought it did. The less someone thinks of you, the more they’ll underestimate you, and Stark did seem to enjoy always having some clever trick up his sleeve.

What it  _ really _ made him wonder was what kind of scalpel-keen insight Natasha would have about  _ him _ .

He had bigger things to worry about, though. Together with Clint, Nat, and occasionally Sam, he spent quite a bit of time chasing leads. They “interviewed” chemists and contractors all across the Midwest. Bucky, having an eye for patterns, started noticing the same names crop up here and there. Part of it he attributed to the out-of-control corporatization of modern America...but part of it…. There were some company names, some addresses, that seemed entirely too familiar. It wasn’t just that they’d come up before in the search for Dr. Interpose. It was something else. He’d seen them before this whole ordeal started, he was certain of it. 

Clint told him not to lose himself on a bunny trail when they were so close to the prize. That advice sat like lead in Bucky’s gut.


	7. Bunny Trails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because you're making progress didn't mean it's going to be pleasant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consistent chapter length, what's that, can I eat it

They made it almost four weeks without major incident. That time the Avengers assembled to take down some two-bit bank robbers armed with black market Chitauri tech didn’t count; Bucky wasn’t even called in on that one. He spent that particular day getting his nails done in the closest town while feeling sorry for himself about not having been called in (the ladies at the salon were wary at first, and no surprise given he was a bit of a muscle beast with a robot arm, but soon they were too busy gushing over his hair to be intimidated). That was beside the point. No  _ real _ incidents occurred for the first twenty-three days since the last transformation.

On day twenty-four, Steve Rogers got _ bitchy _ .

It started with a snide comment about Bucky wanting to sleep in. It hurt, actually, mostly because Steve’s tone made it sound like he meant it, and Bucky was well-accustomed to Steve’s ribbing but not at all to his hostility. Steve was relentless and domineering during morning training; one by one the others tapped out, unwilling to compete against him. When SHIELD called them in to intercept a flight of Doombots that afternoon, he all but barked at the lot of them for what Bucky felt was a perfectly normal amount of sass. He was short-tempered and authoritarian and he looked at Bucky like he was going to eat the man alive the first chance he got.

Stark, always quick on the uptake, was the first to put two and two together. “I know what this is,” he chirped over the comms; “you have PMS. Pre-Monster Syndrome.”

“Shut the fuck up, Tony,” Steve snapped as he smashed a robot’s head off with his shield.

Not one to take advice, Stark followed up with, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just your time of the month. How’s your head? Maybe Nat’s got some Midol for you.”

“I was forced to have a hysterectomy when I was sixteen,” Nat said flatly.

Sam whistled. “Yikes, Stark.”

While he blustered about his misstep, Bucky watched Steve swing a Doombot around by its feet and let fly...in the exact trajectory to clock Stark upside the head.

“Oops,” Steve said, clearly not sorry at all. “How’s your head?”

“Kinda feel like that was on purpose,” Stark grunted.

It was a good battle. No real close calls, but enough action to get Bucky’s blood up, a chance to really exert himself. Afterward he found himself pulled into Steve’s lap for a dizzying makeout that was broken up all too soon by...everyone else in the quinjet, which was a bucket of cold water on Bucky’s head. He tried to cool his heels, but every time he caught Steve’s eyes they were heated.

They didn’t even make it through their post-mission shower—which they took in their suite rather than the lockers—before Steve was inside him. It was a high like fighting, got his blood right up, keeping pace with his lover’s ruthless thrusting. His body was already sore and tired but Steve had energy to spare, it seemed, effortlessly hauling Bucky off his feet and fucking him pinned to the shower wall. The angle was intense; Bucky came untouched, and felt damn good about himself for it as Steve glazed his insides with come.

It was a rare night that Steve was satisfied with a single round. That night was no different. As soon as they were out of the shower he bent Bucky over the side of the bed and pounded him till he was screaming. Only he never let up, and Bucky already had bruises and a twisted ankle, and sooner or later his cries of “Please don’t stop” turned into “Please don’t, stop, Steve stop—yellow!”

He stopped, but left the throbbing bulk of his cock still inside, keeping Bucky’s hole stretched wide. “What’s wrong?” he panted. “Does it hurt?”

Bucky heaved for breath. “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he admitted, “but you’re going too hard. I’m sorry, baby, I just...can you go a little easier?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Steve shushed him and rubbed his back. “You don’t have to apologize for that. I’m the one who’s sorry. You drive me wild is all…. You know how I get after a fight. You’re so beautiful in the thick of it. You’re like a leopard. I just gotta have you.”

Bucky laughed breathlessly, then hissed and gasped at how big that made the cock stuffed up his ass feel, as if it wasn’t already huge. “This is a little more than how you usually get after a fight.” He flexed his asscheeks and pushed back, slowly; Steve inhaled sharply. “You can move...just be a little gentler, okay?”

Steve hummed pleasantly and pushed forward into him just as slowly. “I’ll try.”

They took it easier on each other’s bodies the rest of the night, and once Steve was emptied out and Bucky well-seeded, they fell into a deep, restful sleep.

Regardless of how thoroughly he got fucked the night before, that didn’t stop Bucky from waking up randy—and before Steve, for once. He waited till his lover woke up too and took his time about blowing Steve’s morning wood, and then riding it into the sunrise. Still sleepy, he teased Steve with slow rocking and hard squeezes, taking his time and seeing to his own pleasure with experimental angles and one hand lazily stroking his own cock. Steve watched him like a wolf might a fawn. With no more warning than a quiet growl, Steve’s self-control snapped. In a whirlwind instant Bucky found himself face down on the bed, wrists pinned in one of Steve’s hands, chest pinned to the mattress by the other hand between his shoulder blades, getting pounded within an inch of his life. He squirmed, he wailed, he came shouting with Steve’s teeth in the back of his neck. It was a good way to start the day.

The previous night weighed on him all through breakfast, though. It took him a few false starts to bring it up, but finally he told Steve, “You should talk to Wanda today. You’ve been...pretty intense, lately, and it’s reminding me of how you were a month ago, right before….” He put his hands up at either side of the top of his head to indicate wolf ears.

Steve’s face, predictably, fell. He toyed with his eggs mopily. “I didn’t want to say anything but you’re right, I’m feeling just like I did right before...you know. Guess I’d just been hoping it was a fluke.”

“We all were.” Bucky reached over to put a hand on Steve’s arm. “But this time we know what to look for, so we can be prepared. Did Wanda talk to you about an idea she had?”

“She did, yeah. Suppose it’s time to take her up on the offer. You wanna tag along?”

Bucky considered. “She made it sound a lot like therapy, which is pretty personal. How’s about I stick nearby in case you need me?”

“Deal.”

* * *

This was stupid. It had been Bucky’s idea not to be with Steve during his sessions with Wanda. He wanted this. Why was he so anxious then, standing in the hallway outside her door? It was completely irrational. Even knowing it was irrational didn’t make him feel any less anxious, though, so he needed...he needed to do something rational.

He sat down with his back to the wall and closed his eyes. Bucky pictured himself somewhere calm, somewhere neutral...he found himself looking down at the Loch from Glen Span Arch. Trees on either side of him, water flowing below, an endless summer sky over his head. His thoughts and emotions were little paper boats floating down the creek. He named them: fear of the unknown; fear for Steve’s safety; fear that SHIELD would lock Steve up again; irritation at not knowing what was going on behind that door; hope, desperate hope that Wanda’s plan panned out. He reached out to pluck hope out of the water from a distance he never could in the real world and held it carefully as he let the rest of them drift downstream.

It was 3:56 PM on a Tuesday in September. He was in upstate New York, in the residential building of the Avengers compound. The love of his life was behind that door getting help, and it was not locked. He breathed deep and began systematically tensing and relaxing his muscles from head to toe, and then he opened his eyes.

The closed door was much less frightening now; his anxiety was at a dull roar. Bucky sent a silent thank-you to his therapist, and settled in to wait.

When Steve emerged, he did so looking more relaxed than he had all week, more at peace. Bucky stood and placed a hand on Steve’s arm. “How’d it go?”

Steve took a deep breath and nodded. “Good, it went good. We’ve got a game plan for when the time comes, and she taught me some things I can do when the wolf is too close to the surface, y’know, before the change.”

Bucky clucked his tongue. “If you’d just  _ go to therapy _ like Sam and I keep telling you, you’d have a lot more tools in your belt for that, you know.”

“I know, I know, you keep saying,” Steve sighed. They started on their way to the commissary by silent agreement that they both needed food.

“I love you,” Bucky told him, “and I know how much you take on yourself. Sooner or later you gotta admit, to yourself at the very least, that you’re not as okay as you claim to be.”

“If this whole ordeal has shown me anything it’s that you’re right about that,” Steve said quietly. “I don’t think the wolf goes rabid from hunger alone. All that anger’s gotta come from somewhere.”

Bucky almost stumbled. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It’d been  _ years _ that he and Sam had been gently trying to nudge Steve towards a therapist. The fact that it took being infected with lycanthropy to push him the rest of the way made Bucky laugh a little.

“What’s so funny?” Steve bumped his shoulder.

“Nothing, just. Careful how you tell Sam, he’s likely to rupture something from happiness if you finally go through with it.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The next day Steve met with Wanda again. They spent hours together doing god knows what, but when Steve came back out he had that relaxed, balanced look to him again. It made Bucky’s heart swell. It was a good look on him.

All the same, Bucky’s gut clenched more than a little when Steve turned himself over to SHIELD that evening around sunset. He changed into soft, stretchy clothes no one would miss, scarfed down an entire barbecue chicken by himself, and settled down in the supersoldier-proof cell to wait.

Wanda talked to him through the glass and Steve repeated back what she said. It took a moment for Bucky to realize it was a guided meditation.

“I am an open floodgate,” Steve droned, “and the water is my rage. It flows slowly, but the water swells upstream. I can feel it rise. I am the gates swinging shut. I am the bulwark, and the wolf is the coming flood. My will is the floodgate that closes against his rage. My calm is the dam that will hold the waters back.”

Steve started to twitch as he spoke, then spasm. He and Wanda kept chanting the meditation together—more or less—as tremors started to wrack his body. Even crying out in pain, even with his bones creaking and cracking and snapping back in place, he tried to follow along.

“Come on, Steve, you can do this,” Bucky whispered, barely breathing.

The change was slower and, from the sound of it, more agonizing with Steve actively fighting the wolf-rage. He made it all the way to the completion of the change before his words became a snarling roar and Capwolf threw himself at the glass, clawing and snapping his jaws.

Bucky’s heart broke on the failure. He came so fucking close.

“I’m sorry,  _ veliki brat _ ,” Wanda said with scarlet energy swirling from her hands to the beast, “we’ll try again tomorrow.”

Once she pulled him out of the wolf-rage, Capwolf was apologetic and glum. That is, until Dr. Crawford told them that he wasn’t going to be kept in the cell all night. That got his tail wagging, no matter how dignified his verbal response might have been.

They let him out into an exercise yard with Bucky trailing after him. Capwolf dashed around like a gargantuan dog off the lead, sniffing everything, clearly relishing the grass under his feet (and hands; the way his limbs had changed, he was well-suited to running on all fours). After a few minutes his head snapped up, ears alert, and then he bolted out into the shadows where Bucky lost sight of him.

Moments later, a horrid scream pierced the night. It sounded like a young woman scared out of her mind. Bucky cursed and dashed off towards the sound, heart hammering—but then his scarred old brain finally recognized what it really was, and he trotted to a halt, laughing.

He kept laughing when his transformed lover trudged back into the light with blood on his muzzle and a hangdog look about him, ears back and head down. Capwolf gave Bucky a squinty look of annoyance. Bucky barely had time to gasp as the werewolf slapped his legs right out from under him, then pinned him to the ground with Capwolf’s head resting across his belly.

“I just ate a rabbit,” Capwolf grumbled.

Bucky giggled, breathless, and petted that great shaggy head. “You sure did, buddy. Was it good?”

Capwolf eyed him. His eyes were shockingly-bright blue in this form, with flecks of pale green. “It was f-fucking...delicious. Not that I...had much time to notice. S-sh-saw it moving and...next thing I knew...it was in my mouth. Just instinct.” He licked his maw. “I can’t be trusted...like this.”

Bucky played with his ears and petted his face. Those silky ears flicked as he tickled them. “Instincts are just a set of instructions,” Bucky told him. “Like how I clock the exits of every room I walk into and you wade into fights.” Capwolf snorted at him. “What else do your instincts tell you to do?”

Capwolf thought about that. His ears scanned as he did so, turning like radar dishes towards every little sound. “Hunt,” he rumbled with careful enunciation—still slow, but he was getting better at speaking with this new mouth. “Find cover in trees and darkness. Bite anyone I don’t trust...who gets close. Kill anyone who threatens you. Run. Smell things. Kill. Eat. Mate.”

Bucky’s eyebrows rose. “Mate, huh? We gonna be in the field some night and run the risk of you surprise-fucking me in the middle of an enemy base?”

Capwolf made a weird groan-whine noise, stuck his cold nose into Bucky’s neck, and threw an arm around Bucky’s middle to drag him closer. “Can’t make promises.”

Bucky’s breath shuddered at the hot breath and wet tongue on his skin.

“You smell so good,” Capwolf rumbled in that  _ basso profundo _ growl that made Bucky’s toes curl. “I want you. It’s like a spear...in my guts how bad...I want you. Instinct is telling me to...fuck you till I’m empty and you’re filled to the brim. Mount you, take you.”

“God,” Bucky whimpered, “I want it too.” But as true as that was, he tugged on Capwolf’s golden fur as the werewolf began swinging his graceful, muscular body over Bucky’s. “Steve. _ Steve _ . We’re still being watched. There’s cameras everywhere here.”

“I almost don’t care,” Capwolf growled.

Oh, fuck. Bucky strained against his weight and strength—in vain, and he realized all over again how much of a disadvantage he was at now, strength-wise—but as a clear sign that he was putting on the brakes. Capwolf growled louder, but Bucky insisted: “Steve, red! I care, pal. I’ll make it up to you in the morning. But hey, look, doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other’s company all the same.”

* * *

Somewhere in a control room, a handful of SHIELD employees groaned while another pumped his fist. “Night one, I  _ told _ you they wouldn’t wait around. Those two are freaky, I  _ knew _ it. No one is that wholesome in real life.”

The other four grumbled and handed over twenty dollar bills. “Don’t rub it in, Fred,” one of the others said. “Bad enough we’ve gotta watch Captain America French kissing the Winter Soldier _ as a werewolf...at our job. _ Jesus, his face is covered in blood for crying out loud.”

A third shook her head. “When they told us this job could get weird it was the understatement of the year.”

* * *

Bucky did make it up to Steve the next morning, when he was human again and had eaten and napped. He made it up to Steve on his back, tied to the headboard, with Steve sitting on his face. Bucky was an old pro at eating ass and he rimmed Steve for all he was worth. Steve hummed and sighed in pleasure, but he didn’t just kneel there getting serviced. He worked Bucky over at the same time with Bucky’s favorite toy—a huge, ridged, veiny, prostate-assaulting thing made of sparkly purple silicone. A cock ring kept Bucky hard while denying him release. It was hard to remember to breathe, let alone lick, with that monster slowly drilling in and out of his asshole, but Steve reminded him every time he stopped.

“That’s a good boy,” Steve whispered, “lick it good, get your tongue in there. Good boy. You’re taking it so well, sweetheart. You want my cock too, don’t you.”

Bucky couldn’t really speak with his face buried there but he made a wavering noise of assent.

“Well, too bad. You’re gonna take your little friend here instead this time.” He rocked back gently against Bucky’s face, all but smothering him. “Make me come and take your friend there down to his balls and I’ll give you something nice, though. That’s it, that’s it. Deeper. Faster, baby, fucking god I love your tongue. Yeah, just like that—”

Steve groaned and splashed hot ropes of sperm all over Bucky’s chest and belly. He also used that moment to push the toy deeper inside of Bucky fast enough to make him squeal. Maybe Steve would let him clean his cock—

But no, he stayed seated where he was, and Bucky moaned and kept licking, so full, so fucking close to coming but that goddamn ring wouldn’t let him. His thighs shook, held open by straps around his ankles. Steve didn’t even touch his balls except accidentally; just fucked him deeper and deeper on a dildo even longer than his own dick.

“You did such a good job for me, baby,” Steve crooned. “Love watching this greedy pussy swallow dick. Or my fist. There’s a nice idea for later, hmm? Yeah, you’re almost there, you can do it...there. Ohh, Bucky, that’s such a nice sight.”

The weighty silicone balls finally rested against his perineum. Bucky whimpered, squirmed, he  _ begged _ . 

“Please, I need to come!”

Steve clucked his tongue. “Please what?”

“Please sir!”

Steve shushed him and gracefully shifted away to lie alongside Bucky, still rocking the huge toy into his depths. Finally, finally, Steve showed mercy: he slipped off the cock ring and swallowed Bucky down to the root. Bucky shouted, writhing around between the toy and Steve’s mouth, and that was that: with another shout of “Oh god Steve  _ yes!” _ he shot his load down his lover’s throat and wailed in overstimulation as he got sucked dry, sucked right through his cock wilting back down to its flaccid state—too much, too much, he begged Steve to stop—without meaning it, else he’d’ve used their safeword instead.

Steve doted on him for a while after easing the dildo out of his hole and taking a moment to admire the way it gaped. “Beautiful,” he said reverently, and kissed his blushing cheeks. “Beautiful, and mine.”

* * *

Steve held out a little longer the second night but failed all the same. He was frustrated about it, naturally, but hopeful: this was progress. Plus he got to go out into the exercise yard again and it was hard to stay sullen when he had important running around and rolling in the grass to do. Of course, they couldn’t stop Bucky from following him. That night they ran together through the woods within the compound’s fence line, dancing in and out of darkness, side by side—both because Capwolf, who’d been clocked topping out at forty-six miles per hour, was clearly holding back on his speed for Bucky’s sake, and because Bucky didn’t want to run ahead of him lest he look too much like fleeing prey.

Around the west end they ran headlong into a patch of grass tall enough that Bucky lost sight of his lover, who was loping around on all fours. He skidded to a halt with his heart pounding so loud in his ears he could barely hear anything else. All of a sudden he felt like a deer in a tiger pen. He fingered the barrel of a tranq dart SHIELD had insisted on arming him with before letting him out here, ready to draw it if he must.

His senses strained for any sign of his werewolf lover. Too late, he heard grass rustle behind him, and a monstrous arm whipped out of the darkness lightning-fast, crushing Bucky’s arms to his side and yanking him down out of sight. He was not proud of the noise he made just then.

“Surveillance is gonna flip their shit,” he near-shrieked as he got his bearings. Capwolf was holding him close and...feeling playful and amourous, apparently, to judge by the insistent nudging of something large and hard against his ass through Capwolf’s tattered sweatpants of the night. His beastly lover snickered with a sound like tree limbs snapping and licked whatever bits of Bucky’s skin he could reach. Bucky groaned, forgetting all about cameras and STRIKE teams for a moment—but only a moment.

“Sweetheart,” Capwolf cajoled him, “I know you’ve got tranqs. You don’t need them, baby. Just let ng-mw-me taste you.”

Bucky groaned again. He wanted that. He wanted that  _ so badly _ , but he squirmed in Capwolf’s grasp all the same. His squirming made the werewolf’s clothed hard-on slot perfectly against his ass. Bucky gasped and shivered at the hot, hard bulge pressing against him—god, he wanted  _ that _ .

He forced himself to say, “Baby, they’re gonna send, ohh fuck, they’re gonna send a team with guns if we don’t come back into the open.”

Capwolf made a terrifying, drawn-out growl of frustration and let Bucky go.

Bucky scrambled out of the grass, scanned for the nearest camera pointed their way, and flashed an  _ all-clear _ sign. Hopefully that would be enough to call off the dogs. Bucky snorted at his own brain’s joke.

From there they continued their wandering at an easy walk, the kind they both, as New Yorkers, had to force themselves to slow down enough to do. Bucky watched Capwolf amble along on all fours. His back was longer in this form, Bucky realized, and the height of his long, doglike ankles made his legs bend such that his ass wasn’t way up in the air like if a human tried to walk the same way.

“Is that comfortable, walking like that?” he asked.

Capwolf tipped his head to one side and then the other, consideringly. “Guess so. Feels...natural. As natural as anything about this can be.”

“You’re talking better every night.”

“Thanks. Not easy with a flat tongue.”

“I imagine not.” He did try to imagine it then, having a mouth and tongue shaped like a wolf’s and trying to make human noises with it. No big surprise why certain sounds still gave him trouble now and then. But Bucky was telling the truth: with each transformation, Steve spoke a little easier, with less hesitation and slurring. He cracked a grin. “Not even having a literal muzzle can shut Steve Rogers up.”

Capwolf bumped into Bucky and nearly knocked him off his feet.

A minute or two down the dark jogging trail they were unconsciously following, Capwolf reared up to walk upright, or at least on two legs, hunched over. “I’m sorry, Buck.”

Bucky glanced up at him. “Is this about earlier?”

Capwolf nodded, swiping at his face with one great clawed hand. “Even after Wanda sets my head on straight it’s. Sometimes it’s so hard to think. I see something moving and I want to hunt it. I smell you and I want sex. There are….” He licked his muzzle and Bucky tracked the movement of that big rough tongue with his eyes. “There are a  _ lot _ of animals out here. And they smell  _ delicious _ . Every fucking step is a conscious...effort not to run off and...try to catch them. I’m pretty sure a lot of them are mice.” Capwolf made a face, which largely consisted of wrinkling his nose and baring teeth that could probably tear the throat out of an elephant. “That’s disgusting, Buck, I don’t want to eat  _ mice. _ ”

Bucky choked back laughter and patted his arm sympathetically. “I know,” he said cheekily, “you’re a good boy.”

Oh boy, wrong answer. Capwolf grabbed him by the shoulder and snarled, “ _ Don’t patronize me _ . I’m not a dog.” That voice was pure Steve Rogers, werewolf growl or no.

Bucky threw his hands up, eyes wide. “Sorry, sorry. Shh, easy, sweetheart, don’t get your hackles up.” He took his life into his hands and Capwolf’s muzzle into them too, and gently kissed his wet, black nose.

Capwolf’s tongue flicked up to lick the spot. He eased up on his grip, at least.

Bucky paused and asked, “Would it be easier on you if I didn’t come out here with you?” Capwolf’s ears pinned back in displeasure, but Bucky went on: “Y’know, since you’ve got that whole...mating instinct. Maybe tomorrow night I can just let you do your wolfy thing on your lonesome without me distracting you smelling like a bitch in heat or whatever.”

The werewolf mulled it over, looking deeply unhappy about it the whole time. But eventually he admitted, “Maybe...you know I love you to the ends of the earth, Buck, but maybe you’re...right.”

Bucky kissed the short, bristly fur just above Capwolf’s nose this time, then made a face when Steve licked his nose (and half his face) right back. “’Course I’m right, punk. Never steered you wrong before. Now come on, let’s head back. I wanna find out if you’re as comfy to nap on as you look.”

“By all means.”

He was, for the record.

* * *

The third time the full moon rose, Steve and Wanda tried again. Steve held out for several minutes, growling and howling along with her as long as he could, but eventually he succumbed and Wanda stepped in as usual.

“Kinda sucks you only get three tries a month at it,” Bucky said wryly once Capwolf had been brought, kicking and screaming, out of his wolf-rage.

Wanda gave him a funny look. “I would call it a blessing that he only  _ has to _ try three times a month.”

Bucky shrugged and nodded. Now that she put it like  _ that _ he felt like an ass.

It pained him to do so, but he left Capwolf to his exercises and returned to their suite alone. Bucky figured he’d at least get more sleep if he wasn’t staying up till dawn waiting for human Steve to return.

Well he was dead wrong. He couldn’t sleep for shit after hours of trying, even with the prescription sleeping pills he still needed to get there some nights. He considered spending some time with a toy, but the sleep meds killed his libido. He wound up infosnacking on his phone in bed for hours on end, exhausted but unable to get back to sleep, until Steve finally came trudging in to crawl into bed after sunrise. Then, at long last, he conked out almost as soon as Steve’s arms were wrapped around him.

Now they had a better idea of what to expect. Steve and Wanda kept a standing appointment for practice. All the research being done by SHIELD’s army of scientists was still in its initial stages, so no matter how much Bucky fretted over it, no matter how many times he asked, they had nothing to report. It was a lot of “We’re optimistic about” and “Initial tests were inconclusive” and a lot of jargon Bucky could only barely suss out.

On the other hand, that month did bring cautiously good news on the Dr. Interpose front. He was a slippery bastard but one of Nat’s contacts was circling what could be a break in the case. Of course, she was evasive as to what that break was let alone who the contact was, but that was nothing that surprised Bucky in the least.

Bucky had a revelation of his own, and it wasn’t a happy one.

The familiar names of those contracting companies nibbled at his brain anytime he had nothing else to do. He decided, two weeks after the last shift, to help himself to some SHIELD records.

As the Winter Soldier, all the hacking he did was with bladed instruments; as Bucky Barnes, Take Two, he had learned quickly from Natasha how to break into things in the figurative sense. He wasn’t quite at the level of Nat or Stark yet but it was doable to crack into files he technically didn’t have clearance to read. Part of him was pretty sure SHIELD knew about this and elected not to do anything about it—yet. If that was the case, he intended to take advantage of their leniency for as long as he could.

“Alright, Darvner Construction,” he muttered to himself over his laptop, “let’s find out once and for all why the fuck I can’t get you out of my head.”

Sure enough, one of the contractors identified as having worked on Dr. Interpose’s lair in Ohio turned up in the reports for a previous case: Bucky had been there for the storming of a warehouse that had been converted into a small factory for knockoff Chitauri gear.

And they turned up in another.

And another.

And another.

_ Found something _ , he texted Nat with his heart pounding.  _ Meet at my place? _

_ Be there in 10 _ , she texted back.

By the time she had arrived Bucky was reaching a giddy level of stress as he downloaded files to an encrypted thumb drive. She peered at him and got straight to the point. “What do you have?”

“Does the name Darvner Construction ring any bells?” He looked up in time to see her expression shutter.

She tilted her head. “Maybe, why?”

Bucky hesitated, but beckoned her over to show her what he found, report after report. “They helped turn that bunker in Ohio into Dr. Interpose’s lab. And the copycats factory in Jersey. And the place near Los Alamos with the crazy lady who claimed to be friends with the Grim Reaper. They’re all over the place—if we’ve found a bad guy nest in the US, dollars to donuts says Darvner was involved somewhere. Look, it’s—it’s not always a hundred percent, but there’s names and interviews, business cards found in bad guys’ wallets, phone calls….” He looked up at her. “Nat I think these guys cater to villains.”

Natasha was as inscrutable as ever. “It’s a pattern.”

“Exactly, like this is their M.O., they’ve gotta be—”

Something clicked in his head. He turned to stare at her fully.

“You knew this already. SHIELD _ knows _ about this.” Bucky’s head was a storm of curse words.

“You’re not the first one to make that connection,” she confirmed.

“And you didn’t think to  _ tell me? _ ” he barked. “We could have been chasing this lead for _ months _ , Nat,  _ multiple months! _ We could be staking them out to find the next hive before the goon infestation sets in and we get the next Loki or Vulture on our hands!  _ They could lead us straight to Interpose!  _ Instead, what, SHIELD is just sitting on the information that there’s a fucking construction company custom-building villain lairs all over the country instead of, oh I don’t know,  _ taking them down? _ ”

Nat was unmoved by his anger, which only served to make him angrier. “It’s not just them,” she told him. “SHIELD is aware of about a dozen contractors like this all over the world.”

He shook his head incredulously. “Why are you telling me this?”

She gave him a frank look that was just as practiced as any expression she ever wore. “Because you need to understand why you can’t go after them.” She held up a forestalling hand when he opened his mouth. “There are over a dozen that we know of, all with countless underworld ties, with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars changing hands every year. The money trail vanishes into overseas accounts, and we don’t have proof yet of where it comes out the other side. We know from experience that if we take out one, the connections scatter and reform somewhere else—somewhere we  _ don’t _ know about. Until we find the headwater, drying up the streams only sets us back. But don’t assume no one is keeping tabs on them, Barnes. Why else do you think they’re mentioned by name so often?”

Bucky seethed. “This is why I don’t call myself a spy.”

Her mouth quirked. “You sound a lot like Steve. I hope you’ll listen to reason more readily than he does.” She reached over and gently shut his laptop. “I know you have doubts, but there’s nothing else you need to know about this. Do your blood pressure a favor. Don’t dig.”

She left him to stew over the sickening prospect of whether or not to keep this all from Steve.

* * *

Bucky couldn’t keep a secret from Steve for long. The guilt ate away at him until finally he cracked, and the next thing he knew, Steve and Fury were having a yelling match over why they couldn’t just go bust down doors and shake people down for Dr. Interpose’s contact information.

“Neither of you are going to pursue this and that is final,” Fury bellowed. “If you could see where a company was doing a build and know to keep an eye out for the bad guys in three to eight months, you do not roast the goose laying the golden eggs! This is bigger than your monthly bouts of hirsutism. Let me repeat that, since it seems to take a few tries for you to hear me: the operation I am forbidding you to interfere with  _ is bigger than Captain America being a goddamn werewolf _ . Have I made myself clear?”

“Crystal,” Steve gritted out, stone-faced.

Fury dismissed them and Bucky trailed after Steve’s straight-backed tromping away.

“I don’t like it either,” Bucky muttered.

“Sometimes I feel like all I’ve done since I joined SHIELD is compromise on one thing after another,” Steve growled.

Bucky sighed. “You say that like we didn’t make compromises in the Army. How many Nazis d’you think got pardoned for turning coat?”

“Too many,” Steve said darkly. Neither of them brought up Operation Paperclip, but it was on the tips of their tongues all the same.

Bucky glanced up at Steve’s stormy face. “I know that look. You need a distraction before you go AWOL.”

“You gonna distract me?”

“I have some ideas,” Bucky said mildly.

* * *

His best idea for the job, as it happened, was the cone.

They had to go back to the city to find it, as Bucky hadn’t packed it when this all began. The cone was a trainer of such proportions that would terrify the uninitiated: it started thin at the tip and gradually widened out to something wider than both of Steve’s fists put together. Hell, Bucky was certainly a size queen, and even he felt intimidated every time he looked at the sleek black toy. After nearly a year of sporadic use, he had yet to make it to the base.

It felt good to be back in their apartment, if only for a night. It felt  _ really _ good to have his arms trussed up behind his back in a leather sleeve, squatting down on the cone where it sat on a chair, balanced on his toes. It hurt, too, in an intense, marvelous, singing sort of way. Steve made it both better and worse by cracking a crop against Bucky’s bare, sweat-beaded skin with expert flicks of his wrist. Every time he jolted from a snap the motion threatened to make him lose his balance and come crashing down onto the cone faster than his body could take. He loved a challenge, and Steve loved to challenge him.

Four inches deep, it was already an inch and a half wide. There were no ridges for his hole to catch and rest on—just smooth, lube-slick silicone, a shape true to its name. Bucky whimpered and bit his lip as he drew up and sank back down, determined to take another inch.

“Is that big enough yet for my little slut?” Steve purred.

“No sir,” Bucky sighed.

“I didn’t think so. You can take a lot more, can’t you.” He set the crop just under Bucky’s chin and used it to make him look up at Steve.

“Yes sir,” Bucky smiled.

“Are you sure? You’re taking an awful long time to get there. Does my greedy boy need some help taking it?”

Bucky perked up. He knew what that meant, and he was all for it. “Yes sir, please help me take it.”

“Alright, since you asked so nicely.” Steve patted Bucky’s cheek with the crop, then used it to slap him there right below the cheekbone, and set it aside. Bucky watched eagerly as Steve unzipped his pants and pulled out his already-hard cock. “You know what to do with this.”

“Yes sir,” Bucky promised, and slurped him right down. His enthusiastic bobbing made his body rock to and fro, and he started whimpering in earnest as the motions sent him inching further and further down the cone. It forced his asshole wider and wider, not quite filling him up inside the way he liked but making his hole tingle and sting just the way he needed.

Steve called him a good slut and petted his hair. He rested both hands on Bucky’s shoulders, rocking his hips into his lover’s hot, wet mouth, groaning at the way his cock head slid right down Bucky’s throat. He let Bucky work him until he was close...and then he pushed down with both hands.

Bucky squealed, or tried to, and his throat spasmed around Steve’s thick cock. He didn’t resist Steve at all; he was Steve’s to move as he pleased, to torment and pleasure as he liked, and if Steve said with his actions that Bucky would take another five inches in the span of a few minutes, that’s exactly what he would do. Tears streamed from his eyes. It was so big inside him, so wide, and he couldn’t breathe for the ten inches of cock being held in his mouth and throat but it was okay, Steve wouldn’t let him pass out. He didn’t need to struggle, even though his body wanted to—oh it wanted to badly, but Steve would take care of him, every part of him. Steve pushed a little harder and Bucky’s scream was fully muffled and then Steve was thrusting in and out of his mouth as he came, pushing Bucky down to take the cone wider, wider, three inches wide and growing, and Bucky cried in earnest as he greedily swallowed every drop of sperm Steve fed him.

“Thank you sir,” he coughed after sucking the tip of him clean. Steve rubbed his wet cock all over Bucky’s face, rubbing spit and tears across his reddened cheeks.

“Good boy. Is it big enough for you yet?”

It was _ massive _ , almost like getting fisted, but they both knew the rules of this game. “No, sir,” Bucky sniffled. It wouldn’t be big enough until Steve said it was.

“Didn’t think so. I wanna be able to fit my fist in that pussy when you stand up.” He picked the crop back up, leaving his only-half-soft cock out on display, and smacked the crop right on the haft of Bucky’s own straining dick. Bucky cried out sharply and rocked on the cone. “That’s it, good boy, fuck yourself on it.”

Bucky was really feeling it now. The deceptively-thin tip nudged open his rectosigmoid juncture and the toy slipped deeper and deeper inside him. Now, finally, he was really being filled. He winced in earnest when he rose up; Steve checked in with him and they agreed to pause for more lube, and he sank back down easier than ever. Oh, but it was a strain. His hole was on fire and it was ecstasy. Bucky’s cock dribbled precome and bobbed obscenely between his wide-open legs, inviting another smack from the crop.

“Thank you sir,” he wailed.

“How big?” Steve asked him.

Bucky gasped for breath, legs trembling. He squirmed to force himself down a little more. “I, I think, almost four inches.”

“Almost four inches what?”

Bucky cussed at his slip. “Almost four inches, sir!”

“Mm. Can’t be having that. Count them.”

Bucky whimpered but obeyed: he wailed out a count of each searing crack of the crop against his thighs, ten on each side, and he thanked Steve when his punishment was done.

“Let that be a lesson,” Steve said in his Stern voice that never failed to bring Bucky to heel. “As you were. Let me know when you think you’ve got four.”

“Yes sir,” Bucky sniffed. He moaned wantonly as he kept fucking himself on the impossible breadth of the cone, cock throbbing, balls tight. Through a concerted effort he relaxed his hole enough to slide down, down, down, so far it made him scream and beg Steve “Please, please, please, sir, please!”

Steve was unmoved—or at least he sure made it look like he was, except his dick was standing at attention again. “Please what?”

Bucky struggled for breath. “Please sir I wanna come,” he begged, voice strained.

“Hmm. How big?”

“More than four, oh my god sir please, I can’t—”

Steve nodded and patted Bucky’s cock with sharp, rhythmic taps from the crop. “Come for me, slut,” he commanded, and Bucky burst apart at the seams. He screamed as he came, striping the crop and splashing all over the floor.

His asshole was screaming for relief when he came back to himself. Steve held the come-soaked crop to Bucky’s lips and he kissed it, tasting leather and himself when he licked his lips.

“Good boy,” Steve said warmly. He left Bucky trembling there for a moment to retrieve a tape measure and measured out the cone right where it met Bucky’s hole. He whistled low and announced, “Seventeen inches around. What’s that in diameter?”

Thank fuck math was a second language to Bucky; he barely had two brain cells left to rub together to make English at the moment, because that monster was  _ still in his ass _ . “F-five, five point four, sir,” he panted.

“ _ Very _ nice. Up. Time for your reward.” He held Bucky under the arms to help him straighten up off the cone nice and slow. Bucky groaned as it slid out of him. His asshole gaped open, unable to close up properly yet. From experience he knew it wouldn’t for at least a couple hours after the cone.

Steve laid him down on the bed face-down in a pillow, and arranged his legs so his knees were bent and held wide with his ass in the air. Steve knelt behind him, spread his cheeks with both hands, and leaned in to more or less make out with Bucky’s gape. This was the big reason for edible lube. Steve shoved his tongue straight into Bucky’s ruined asshole, kissing it open-mouthed, nibbling the abused rim. Bucky groaned in pleasure and forced himself to lay still and let Steve have his way with him. His lover took his time about Frenching his gape, murmuring now and then about what a pretty pussy it was. Having any part of him called pretty never failed to make Bucky blush.

Once Steve was satisfied, he lubed up his hand past the wrist, tucked his thumb, and slipped it right into Bucky’s cunt. Bucky cried out; he couldn’t resist squirming a little at the massive, oh-so-welcome intrusion of Steve’s fist punching into his open guts. His hole was wrecked enough that he was easy to fist: just how Steve liked him. Once again Steve took his time with it. This was as much for his own gratification as it was for Bucky’s pleasure.

“Gonna make sure you’re nice and loose for me, baby,” Steve crooned. “You take my fist so pretty. Your pussy looks so fuckin’ tasty taking my hand like this. Gonna have to double fist you again sometime. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh god,” Bucky groaned, “yes sir, I’d like that very much.” He pushed back, but Steve gave him a smart spank on the asscheek for it. “Sorry sir, it just feels... _ so good _ . So good when you split my pussy open on your fist and your cock.”

Steve chuckled, and Bucky could feel it in his colon. “Oh you think you’re getting my cock, do you?”

Like hell, Bucky knew full well Steve wasn’t going to deny himself that pleasure. But he sweetened his voice and said, “Please, sir, I’m all wet and ready for you. You can just slip right in whenever you want.”

Steve bit the meat of Bucky’s ass cheek, making him squeak. “I can do that anyway. This hole belongs to me.”

“Yes sir,” Bucky sighed in agreement. He’d agree to anything with Steve’s knuckles rubbing against his prostate like that.

“But _ I guess _ since you’ve been so good,” Steve said, as if he had an iota of reluctance in him, “you can have my cock, greedy boy.”

Bucky squirmed happily. “Yay,” he grinned.

Slow and easy, Steve took his fist out of Bucky’s ass, slicked his cock with the lube covering that hand, and grabbed Bucky’s hips. He twisted his hips around till his cock lined up with Bucky’s gape. Steve entered him with a single thrust and started fucking that sloppy hole hard and fast right off the bat. It offered him no resistance.

“Ahh you feel so good,” Steve hissed, “fucking love your cunt when it’s wet and open like this. Love it when it’s wet and tight, too. I love your pussy any way I can get it.”

Bucky mewled happily, holding his ass aloft for Steve to pound on. Pleasure zinged all through him. His refractory period wasn’t nearly as short as Steve’s most days, but getting his ass fucked raw always made his cock perk up. Steve didn’t last too long like that before he blew his load deep in Bucky’s ass—and didn’t miss a stroke. He just kept fucking as long as his cock stayed hard.

That turned out to be well over half an hour.

Bucky himself got a few mind-bending orgasms out of the deal; they were never better than when he had Steve’s dick inside him. They paused only for lube, but after each time Steve dumped come into Bucky’s guts he slowed down some for a bit, only to pick his brutal pace back up all over again. Soon enough he’d have Bucky wailing again and the sounds of skin on skin and Steve’s cock thrusting through the mess of Bucky’s ass cracked loudly through the room. Bucky lost count of how many times Steve came inside him. His brain was all fuzz, nothing but pleasure and pain from head to toe.

When he came to he was  _ filthy, _ and Steve was kissing his neck and shoulders while unbinding his arms. He discovered, unpleasantly, that the right one had fallen asleep in the sleeve and was unhappy at being woken back up. The rest of him hurt exquisitely.

“I’ll get a towel,” Bucky murmured. He made to roll off the bed but Steve stopped him.

“I’ve got a better idea. Stay right there.” When Steve returned to the bed, he had one of Bucky’s bigger plugs  _ and _ a washcloth. The plug slipped in easy, making Bucky hum in pleasure when it locked into place. He always loved those nights when Steve made him go to bed with his mess still filling him up. Steve was tender through cleanup. They’d shower in the morning; for the moment, they were perfectly content with that much, and to fall asleep cuddled together in post-coital bliss.

Distraction successful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darvner is an Easter egg. Hint: it's an anagram that points to who's really funding all that construction.


	8. Breakthroughs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now, several moments you've all been waiting for....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🌕🐺👅🚀🥨😍💦🎉🎆

Bucky floated through the days, splitting his time between the compound and the city. He threw himself into training to the point of exhaustion just to take his mind off the ever-cooling trail of Dr. Interpose and the breadth of SHIELD’s secrets looming over him. Like clockwork, Steve became a Grade A Bitch a few days ahead of the full moon, and Bucky weathered it as well as he could. As long as they checked in often, the raucous sex they had by night mostly made up for Steve’s prickliness throughout the day.

Memories of childhood cropped up more and more clearly; something in Steve’s pre-full-moon snarliness shook things loose in Bucky’s head. Steve would whip around with a fiery look about him at some ill-aimed jibe and suddenly the scents of Brooklyn summers flooded his nose and he saw Steve there, slight and sky-eyed and golden flame, and he couldn’t help the smile bubbling up from his molten heart.

“What’re you smiling about?” Steve would challenge him, and Bucky would laugh and say  _ I just remembered that time on the Bridge when a seagull took a shit on your shoe _ or  _ Sorry, you just...looked exactly how you did in ‘28 all of a sudden, after some bullies roughed you up _ and Steve would huff because happiness over Bucky remembering things from their past warred with his pique at the present.

Some nights they fought over small things until Bucky gave in and Steve agreed to meditate with Wanda in the morning. Some nights they fucked like desperate beasts and fell asleep as tangled as vines.

The first night of the full moon was like a storm breaking. Steve made good progress on resisting the wolf-rage, but still lost the fight in the end. Wanda had an easier time bringing him back out of it, too, which they all attributed to the fact that Steve had eaten just before moonrise. It certainly lent credence to the hypothesis that the wolf-rage was at least in part caused by literal hunger—but it seemed like not even Steve Rogers could eat enough in one sitting to fully fuel the transformation.

SHIELD had something new in store for Capwolf that first night. “We’d like to run you through some combat exercises,” Dr. Crawford told him. Capwolf agreed rather eagerly, as paradoxically energetic as he was.

Bucky rocked back on his heels and frowned, uncertain of how he felt about this. On the one hand, he was clever enough to know this was SHIELD testing the waters of exploiting Steve’s “lycanthropic mutagenic spasms” (ugh). On the other hand, remembering his pants-shitting terror that first fateful night (literally; some of those AIM agents had messed themselves before dying), it would probably be pretty fucking awesome to see a werewolf fighting in a controlled environment.

Awesome. Yeah. That’s what he was going with. Only he partly meant it in its original context: instilling awe, a combination of surprise, respect, and fear. It was a word used by priests to describe the power of avenging angels.

Bucky looked over at where his monstrous lover was stretching out his long, claw-tipped limbs and rolling his apelike shoulders. He turned just right so that a light caught his eyes and made green flame reflect back from his tapeta lucida. Maybe the description was apt.

Bucky trailed along after the swarm of scientists following Capwolf to the training grounds, and took a seat on the stadium benches near the obstacle course. He watched Steve sniff around, ears scanning his surroundings; he threw his head back and, for the first time since his first nights,  _ howled _ .

It was shockingly loud, echoing throughout the gymnasium, and absolutely bone-chilling. There was a gut-clenching wrongness to it, probably owing to the hybrid nature of Capwolf’s voice. The scientists all ceased their banter. They stopped what they were doing entirely. Bucky shivered as adrenaline flooded his system. Something in that sound set off an alarm from their ancestral memory that sang out,  _ Danger is here, danger is here. _

It was terrifying, and Bucky was sporting wood.

_ There is something very wrong with me, _ he thought savagely—then aborted self-reflection, because Capwolf was readying himself for something. His ears and nose were already trained on something Bucky couldn’t see or hear yet. Dr. Crawford called, “Start!” and Capwolf dashed off into the obstacle course.

Normally Steve went through the course like an acrobat. Now, it was a little like watching the Hulk run it—only Capwolf had a great deal more finesse. He scaled walls and made impossible leaps with ease, and when the training bots finally came out, he was ready for them. After dodging a few stun blasts, Capwolf triangulated himself underneath one, and leapt  _ fifteen feet straight up _ to catch it with all the ease of a cat bashing a bird out of the air. He savaged the thing with teeth and claws, snarling horribly; in seconds it was a mangled heap of scrap.

Apparently Bucky was so keyed into Capwolf’s performance that when a voice to his left said, “Aww come on, dick move,” he damn near jumped out of his skin. Ruffled, he glared daggers at Stark, who thankfully had not noticed that he actually got the drop on the famously-hypervigilant Winter Soldier. Bucky would never have lived it down if he had.

“Come to see the show?” Bucky asked him, playing it cool.

Stark looked back at him. “I heard that howl the next building over. Thought something interesting might be going on. Apparently I got here just in time to see Capwolf making tinsel of  _ EIGHTEEN MILLION DOLLAR TRAINING BOTS _ ,” he yelled at Capwolf at the end. Stark gesticulated. “And another. Hey guys, this is not normal Avengers wear and tear. We know he can shred metal like Lemmy. Could you maybe alter the program to use something a little easier to replace? I’ll have you know I don’t outsource fabrication on those!”

The scientists nodded to him and the one at the course programming station made adjustments while Stark muttered to himself about months of smithing. The lone remaining training bot—missing an arm and half of one leg—got recalled, and drones swarmed out to harass Capwolf on his way through the obstacle course instead.

Bucky and Stark watched dumbly as Capwolf plucked them out of the air just as easily. “That’s not normal, right? Are wolves really this good at jumping or is it just him?”

Bucky...didn’t know, honestly. He realized he didn’t know much about wolves in general, and stowed away the task of fixing that for later. If anything it reminded him of something he saw in a documentary once.

“He’s like a caracal,” Bucky murmured.

Stark glanced at him. “Hmm, say again?”

“A caracal.” Bucky glanced back, avoiding eye contact. “It’s an African wildcat. They jump up and pick birds out of the sky like that.”

“Terrifying,” Stark deadpanned. “Glad I’m not a bird. Glad he’s on our side in general.”

Bucky shivered. “I got to see what it’s like when he’s not. I just hope Wanda’s project pans out.”

“Don’t we all.” Stark inclined his head towards the SHIELD personnel standing a little ways off from the benches. Bucky grumbled in agreement.

It truly was awe-inspiring to watch Capwolf fight. He twisted and spun faster than Bucky’s keen eyes could follow, jaws crushing drones as if they were made of pipe cleaners and sugar glass, claws gouging furrows in concrete. The drones’ laser guns accomplished little more than singing his fur. Right at the end of the course, they surrounded him in a cloud. Capwolf bellowed out a blood-jellying roar and became a whirlwind of claws and fangs. With brutal, crushing swipes he slammed them into each other and the floor; at one point he used the shattered shell of one he’d destroyed to bash in others, fangs bared and snarling like a bloodthirsty ape with a rock. He loped across the finish line, and as soon as the scientist with the stopwatch called “Time!” he threw his head back for another howl that turned Bucky’s bones to ice and his cock to solid steel.

Capwolf met his eyes across the gym and beelined for him, but the scientists got to him first, and swept him away.

The next day, once Steve had a chance to shower and sleep off his night of lupine activities, he pounced on Bucky and bent him over the kitchen table. He ate Bucky out till he was crying and then stuffed himself inside and went to town.

“Saw you watching last night,” Steve huffed. “I could smell you all the way from the obstacle course. Saw you tenting your pants, too.”

“Guilty,” Bucky grunted, not feeling guilty in the slightest.

Steve raked his nails down Bucky’s back. “Tell me what you were thinking,” he said, and Bucky heard the order for what it was.

“Oh god,” Bucky whined.

“Tell me.” He bit Bucky’s flesh-and-blood shoulder while driving into him with sharp, hard thrusts, spearing him open again and again. 

“You were amazing,” Bucky wheezed, tilting his hips so Steve’s cock would rub harder against his prostate. “Beautiful. Terrifying. God, Steve, I was so turned on, I don’t even know why.”

Steve hummed and toyed with a nipple, which made Bucky squeak and squirm. “Yes you do.”

“It was hot! You, ahh, watching you just ffffucking demolish everything in your, ah, ah, path like nothing could stop you, yes baby right there—fuck, yes, you were so fuckin’  _ powerful _ , all those muscles and big sharp teeth.”

“You like the teeth, huh?” Steve purred, and bit him again hard enough to bruise. Bucky howled for him, hips bucking.

“Unh...yeah, baby, I like the teeth. Fuck. And I’m, fuck yeah, so fuckin’ curious about what your cock is like when you’re Capwolf. Wanna feel it in me like a jackhammer.”

Steve growled in his ear and gripped his hips harder. He added an upward jerk to his thrusts that stretched Bucky’s eager hole out more and made his whole body sway. “How do you imagine the wolf fucking you, huh baby? Fast and hard, just like this? Like I’m gonna break you open?”

Bucky nodded insensibly. “Yeah, sweetheart, just like that, so hard I can’t walk after you’re through with me. You’re so fuckin’ hot, you have no idea.”

Steve took mercy on him with a reach-around and soon made Bucky come all over the table, crying out helplessly and squeezing Steve’s thick cock tight. Steve hummed his approval. “You give me some idea.”

It was his turn then. He pounded the daylights out of Bucky’s ass and it was all Bucky could do to push back against him until he slammed in tight and pumped Bucky full of his come. They collapsed together, Steve’s bulk squishing Bucky for a moment, until they caught their breath.

All that before coffee. They spent most of the day in bed, though they didn’t see the entirety of a single movie they queued up.

Moonrise found them in the cell again, on their customary sides of the glass. Wanda guided Steve through his meditation while Bucky watched, clinging to a thread of hope. As with every wolf-night before, the strain of the transformation turned his mantra into roars as the moon climbed higher into the sky above.

“I am the...aaargh...I am...bulwark…. Th-th-thhheolf is,  _ augh _ is the coming flood—”

“Come on, come on, you can do this,” Bucky murmured, pressed close to the glass wall as Steve thrashed, and changed, and chanted through the pain.

“MY WILL— my will— is, aaaaurrrgghh, aghh, is the dam that— Wanda!” His mouth was bloody from his wolf teeth pushing his human ones out of his skull, and effort and jaw-snapping churned the blood to pink foam.

“Fight it, fight it, Steve, you’re almost there,” Wanda cried out to him.

“...Is the dam tha— aagh—”

“Closing against your rage,” Wanda prompted, slapping the glass with her palm. Her rings tinked against the glass.

“Closing...against...my rage,” Capwolf panted, collapsing onto his ass. His tongue lolled out like a dog’s as he heaved for breath.

For a moment there was silence.

“You did it,” Bucky breathed.

“You did it,” Wanda echoed.

“You fuckin’ did it! Babe you did it, it worked!” Bucky laughed giddily.

Capwolf’s ears pricked up and his tail thumped as the realization of what they’d accomplished settled over him. “I did it,” he rumbled in astonishment. “Wanda we did it!”

Wanda jumped up and down, slapping the glass with both hands now. “It worked, it really worked!”

Steve howled in joy, and for all it made Bucky freeze like a deer in headlights, he was lightheaded with their triumph. The wolf-rage could be resisted. He fucking did it.

“Let me the fuck out of here,” Capwolf demanded happily, “I owe my boyfriend something.”

Bucky just about swallowed his tongue. But his excitement was soon soured when Dr. Crawford denied Capwolf’s demand: they wanted him in the gym again tonight. Bucky cursed out loud. He was at the point where he didn’t care if they heard him. In fact he kinda hoped they did.

Back in the training gym, they brought out Stark’s heavy-duty training bots. He fucking decimated them too, albeit not quite as easily as the standard ones. Bucky half listened in on the scientists’ conversations while watching the display of martial divinity playing out in front of them. They sounded a lot more positive about the whole “lycanthropic mutagenic spasm” thing now—like it was an opportunity instead of a problem to solve.

Bucky couldn’t say he was surprised; not after the previous night. How did he feel about it? He still wasn’t sure; with Steve proving he could keep his wits about him without Wanda’s powers intervening, Capwolf’s jaw-dropping physicality certainly looked a little more like a gift than a curse. That didn’t mean Steve wanted to stay like that, though. Bucky scratched his flesh fingertips through stubble he really ought to shave off (Steve was hairy enough for the both of them right now). Maybe it was having his brains scrambled by Hydra for decades that did it, but he wasn’t the most trusting sort to begin with—and after the devastating reveals of Insight Day, he couldn’t honestly say he trusted SHIELD, even if he worked for them. It just smacked of exploitation.

Maybe he was being unfair. If SHIELD was anything, it was pragmatic: never ones to look a gift horse in the mouth.

But if he wasn’t just being paranoid—if his sickening thoughts were correct—would SHIELD really sabotage the search for a cure? Would they relegate the work to an underfunded bureaucratic hell, doomed to limp along so slowly a cure would never be in sight so that SHIELD could keep a pet werewolf on a leash?

Stark showed up again while Bucky was mulling, and sat closer this time. That was Stark-speak for “I need to talk to you” more than it would ever be about companionship, at least between them.

“I see we’ve moved on to wrecking the HD models now,” Stark said snidely around a mouthful of candied ginger.

“If we had scrap Doombots I bet they’d send him after those instead,” Bucky said, voice pitched low so the scientists below the benches wouldn’t hear.

Stark tapped the side of his nose. “You mean if SHIELD had them and was willing to part with them. They’re next to impossible to reprogram for some reason. Not for lack of trying. Just haven’t gotten there yet. Ever wonder what cleanup does with the ones we destroy?”

Bucky squinted. This was not helping his paranoia. “Yeah, actually.”

Stark gave him a look. “So do I.”

Bucky blinked. “I would’a thought they’d keep you in the loop about that.”

Stark quirked his eyebrows and leaned back on his elbows. “Yeah well, that makes two of us. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Bucksicle. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about working with SHIELD is that they operate on a strict need-to-know basis—and so do I.”

Bucky scraped his teeth over his lower lip. “Anything I need to know right now, Stark?”

“You ask good questions.” If Bucky were anyone but Bucky Barnes, Stark would have offered him some ginger, he was sure. “Another thing about SHIELD is when they look at me, they see Iron Man first, foremost, and sometimes only, and when they look at Steve Rogers, they see Captain America.”

“Most do,” Bucky said, a bit bitter about it.

“What I’m saying is the one thing I trust SHIELD to do is to try to find a way to come out on top of any given situation. If that means a disease benefits them more than the cure, they’re not gonna be very invested in finding a cure.”

Bucky sat up. “I was literally just thinking the same thing.”

“That means you’ve been paying attention.” Stark inclined his head towards the scientists, subtly. “What  _ you _ need to know is that since I’m personally funding Project Monkshood, I have primary oversight to it. It doesn’t roll up to Fury. It rolls up to _ me. _ ” He meant the side project to research a cure—the satellite to SHIELD’s project. He held Bucky’s gaze. “That means if they happen to start losing paperwork or dragging their feet or reallocating funds away from their side of things, my part in this is gonna stay on target.”

Bucky took in what Stark was saying, and gratitude flooded him, even as he was chilled by the fact he propped up Bucky’s suspicions at the same time. 

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

Stark’s mouth flattened and he looked away, affecting his devil-may-care nonchalance again. “It’s not for you.”

Bucky flinched. Stark had a way of jabbing little thorns into his side every time he let his guard down for an instant. It was the big reason he had given up on trying to make nice with the man. “I know. But I’m grateful all the same. It’s good knowing you’ve got his back in ways I can’t.”

“Hey, just get a few degrees in particle physics and molecular biology and I’m sure you’d be a credit to the team,” Stark said. “You take care of most of his needs as it is. Let someone else do the heavy lifting once in a while.”

“Thanks, Tony,” he murmured. 

“I can’t watch this anymore. Those are all hand-built for crying out loud. It’s like having the Big Guy in the gym, fuck. Not coming outta my paycheck, that’s for sure.” And without another word, Stark left.

_ Natasha was right about him, _ Bucky thought with a smirk.

Capwolf kept throwing Bucky heated looks throughout the night, but they never got so much as a moment alone before dawn.

* * *

Bucky stared at the blank browser tab on his laptop, head swimming. He’d finally gotten around to looking at Capwolf’s MRIs. Things were...weird. Just  _ weird _ . 

The werewolf was built as elegantly as if he’d evolved that way naturally: organs, skeleton, and musculature all in proportion, albeit eerily inhuman proportions. His lungs were immense, for one, which Bucky figured made sense given his stamina. His spine and neck curved forward, which accounted for Capwolf’s hunched posture when standing upright. Three extra bones in his spine made his torso longer than a human’s, in proportion. Bucky had stared at the scans of Capwolf’s head for a long time trying to figure out what the weird structure in the roof of his mouth was before realizing there were notes too. Then he’d had to Google “vomeronasal gland” to find out what the hell the scientists were talking about.

None of that was what really threw Bucky for a loop.

It was Capwolf’s cock.

Steve hadn’t been lying: it was _ definitely _ shaped different, pointed at the tip and bulging at the base, and there was in fact an honest-to-god bone inside it. The whole thing was wrapped in what looked like a tube of skin with fur on the outside, like a dog’s sheath. It was unlike anything he could ever remember seeing and he couldn’t figure out how he felt about it. So now he found himself caught between buzzing curiosity and unaccountable dread, working himself up to do an image search to find out what wolf wang actually looked like.

He took the plunge.

Yeah, it was  _ weird _ .

What he found made him feel a little dirty for looking but it also didn’t exactly match up to what he saw on the MRI. Capwolf’s business was a little more—human, he supposed, even if it was terribly similar. Did he want that inside him? Was he a complete pervert for wanting his werewolf boyfriend to split him like a log? The bulge at the base apparently inflated, and  _ that _ was interesting in semi-uncomfortable ways. But at the end of the day, Capwolf was just Steve in a different shape, and he’d already been through a startling physical transformation decades ago when Steve turned up at Azzano in the body of a Greek god.

A memory rose from the scarred recesses of Bucky’s brain. He was on march in a forest, feet aching, swirling with anxiety. The pneumonia he’d been suffering when the Nazis dragged him to the cold room had disappeared into thin air and he felt unaccountably healthy and terrified of that fact. He glanced at the stranger wearing Steve’s face and was met with a watery smile. There was no denying the man was devastatingly attractive, but what happened to  _ his _ Steve, the one that was his and his alone? What mad scientist had done this to him? Was this really still Steve? Bucky’s attraction to him felt like a betrayal of the friend he’d held so dear.

In the present, Bucky sucked in a sharp breath and his eyes refocused. Clearly he’d gotten past that. Was it really so different now, with Steve moonlighting in yet another foreign body?

The sound of Steve stirring in the bedroom made Bucky jolt and slam his laptop shut. This wasn’t going to leave his head, he just knew it. But he’d...maybe he should just...see it in person, and make a decision then. God, he needed coffee. God, he kinda wished he could still get drunk.

* * *

Bucky finally,  _ finally _ got his chance to make that decision that very night.

Once again Steve successfully staved off the wolf-rage. If Bucky didn’t know any better he’d swear the transformation was faster this time, too. As soon as the scientists released Capwolf from the quarantine cell, he dashed off into the dark faster than even Bucky could follow. Bucky sighed, frustrated, and sat down under a tree to dick around on his phone while he waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After two hours, he gave up and went back to their suite. If Capwolf wanted to spend his night running around in the woods, Bucky couldn’t really fault him. Still, he was allowed to feel a little put out at being left behind. He whipped up a lazy dinner, took a long shower for some special hygiene care, and settled in for some streaming. There was a series on deep space he’d been meaning to get to, so that’s just what he did.

Past midnight, Bucky was enraptured by a voiceover describing how ancient exploding stars seeded their universe with the elements that made up life on Earth, when the front door  _ CRUNCHED _ . Bucky just about jumped out of his skin. He was on his feet in an instant, reaching for a knife he’d hidden in the couch—but when the door listed open, it was Capwolf’s head that peeked in. Bucky blew out a breath.

“Welcome back, babe. Did you just break the door?”

Capwolf’s ears pinned back in chagrin. “Only a little,” he rumbled.

Bucky sighed again, full of fondness. Trust Steve not to know his own strength. As the big galoot stepped inside and gingerly closed the mostly-intact door, Bucky got a good look at the state of him. His fur was full of sticks and leaves, and parts of him were dusted with soil. 

Bucky shook his head. “Did you enjoy yourself out there?”

Capwolf’s tail wagged hard and gave Bucky a big, doofy, dog-like grin; but a moment later, he grimaced. “I ate a mouse,” he admitted.

Bucky laughed hard enough it bent him over.

The werewolf decided he’d had enough of that and picked Bucky up one-armed and marched him to the bedroom, snuffling at him the whole time while Bucky squirmed.

“You smell clean,” Capwolf growled, pleased.

Bucky puffed up and bit his lip. “Top to bottom.”

Capwolf’s ears pricked up. “Is that so.” 

He set Bucky down on the bed and slowly peeled his shirt off, careful of his bearlike claws, licking with that broad, rough tongue as he revealed his lover’s flesh. Bucky shivered and allowed himself to be moved. His boyshorts (long since having abandoned pants) came off next and there he sat, nude and trembling before a monster that could end him in the blink of an eye with nothing to hide his arousal. 

Capwolf kept licking, pressing him back to lie down, and Bucky shimmied up the bed. That tongue rasped soft and wet across his cock and balls and he could have died on the spot. Bucky spread his legs and reached down to sink his fingers into the fur atop Capwolf’s golden head. It felt like all the air left his lungs at once. The werewolf’s tongue was like nothing he’d had on his cock before, and it was  _ exquisite _ , just textured enough to make his nerves sing, close enough to deadly fangs to make his lizard brain scream. His love was dangerous. Wild and dominant, Capwolf pinned Bucky down with a clawed hand on one shoulder and licked him to full mast—even briefly taking Bucky’s cock between his teeth as delicately as an egg and sucking. The ribs of the roof of his mouth pressed and slid against his glans once that tongue worked his foreskin back, and Bucky damn near howled. He couldn’t take his eyes off that mouth. His heart hammered in his chest. It was, without a doubt, the single most terrifying blow job he’d had in his life, and Bucky was giddy with it.

It ended all too soon, but Capwolf had something just as good in store for him: his free hand lifted Bucky’s leg up and out by the ankle, and Capwolf pushed his muzzle between Bucky’s cheeks to start eating him out like he was starving. This time Bucky did howl. He twisted uselessly in the werewolf’s grasp. That tongue lapped and lapped against his soft, clean hole, and when Bucky discovered it had enough muscle control to push  _ into _ him, he lost all capacity for speech. He’d never dreamed of having his prostate  _ licked _ before but that’s exactly what happened, over and over again, deliciously spread out on the tongue’s forgiving girth, and it didn’t take long before he came with his cock completely untouched. He gasped and moaned when Capwolf licked him clean, then tried weakly to push him away when it became too much stimulation for his frazzled mind to handle.

Bucky was greedy, once he caught his breath. Once was almost never enough. He knew what he wanted. Even if it was weird, no matter what it looked like, that was Steve’s cock, and Bucky wanted it inside him.

“Show me,” he panted, “show me. I wanna see it.”

Capwolf licked his chops, but his ears went back as he straightened. “Did you see the scans?”

Bucky nodded. “Earlier today. Took me a while to get up the nerve, but. I know it’s different. I wanna see it for myself. Promise I won’t freak out on you.”

Tail wagging slowly, Capwolf half-peeled, half-tore off the blown-out sweatpants covering his lower half. Bucky held his breath...and stared.

There wasn’t much left of the human at first glance. A few inches of deep red, pointed, glistening cock poked out of a thick sheath, and his sparsely-furred balls hung full and heavy below. The red part looked skinned, almost, and the glans was on full display. That’s what made Bucky blink.

“What happened to your foreskin?” He couldn’t help but reach for it. “It’s...it’s missing.”

Capwolf looked down and rubbed his sheath. “I think this is it, actually.”

“Wild.” A moment of hesitation, and Bucky finally touched, causing a sharp inhale. A bit more cock slid into view. It was burning hot to the touch and wet already.

“Kiss it,” Capwolf rumbled. It sounded like an order, and Bucky couldn’t help but obey. 

He leaned in and kissed the tip—it was squishy, as if still flaccid, and when he took it between his lips to tease with his tongue it tasted like Steve only meatier. A massive hand came to rest on the back of his head. Bucky opened his mouth and let the wet length slide across his tongue to fill his mouth. Holding the sheath with one hand, he gave careful but enthusiastic head, and he found that more and more cock slipped out as he did so. About halfway down the shaft was harder—right, the bone. Bucky moaned as it hit the back of his throat and kept going. The bulge at the base met the sheath’s mouth, and he worked the prepuce down over it, bobbing and sucking.

“Oh shit,” he gulped when he came up for breath. At full mast, Capwolf was longer and just as thick as regular Steve, and the knot was as big as a woman’s fist. That was going to be a challenge. Size queen that he was, Bucky was gagging for it already.

Capwolf’s tail swished happily. “Like what you see?”

“It’s different,” Bucky answered honestly, “but you are absolutely putting that entire thing up my ass.”

His lover wagged harder as he went back to work blowing that huge, strange cock. “Need you,” Capwolf growled, pawing at him. “Let me put it in you. Need to be inside you now. Tell me how you want it.”

Bucky slurped loudly as he pulled off, and wiped his mouth. “You’re a werewolf, is that even a question?”

To illustrate, he turned to face the wall on his hands and knees. He was shivering all over. This was happening. He was going to fuck a werewolf. It was really happening.

Hands closed over either side of his hips as Capwolf pulled him down to the end of the bed. “Fingers first?”

Bucky’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “Claws, sweetheart, claws.”

“Good point.” 

“I’ll be fine,” Bucky assured him. “It’s already soaking wet and it’s pointy. That should make it easier to get in.”

Capwolf rumbled agreement, wrapped both arms around Bucky’s middle, and pressed his front to Bucky’s back, a blanket of hot fur and hard muscle. He started pushing against Bucky in shallow, seeking thrusts. Just as Bucky found himself wondering why Capwolf didn’t just hold it to guide it in like usual, the tip kissed his hole, and the next thing he knew he was full of cock. It speared him open and punched the breath out of him, and as soon as he could draw air again he released it in a quavering yell.

The girth was a lot to take without prep but he’d had worse. The odd natural slickness of Capwolf’s cock helped it slide deeper and deeper into Bucky’s passage with each sharp, swift thrust. Bucky yelled and gasped wordlessly the whole time. Fire spread through his body, an ineffable blend of pleasure and pain, as his ass made way for his lover’s intrusion. Before long the knot was bashing up against his rim...and Capwolf started fucking him for real.

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. His legs went to water but Capwolf kept him up as if he weighed nothing at all. Bucky could barely push back he was so in over his head, and his bounces felt glacially slow and kitten-weak compared to the jackhammer speed and force of Capwolf’s hips crashing into his. The world narrowed to the foot of flesh and bone where their bodies met and met and met. Tears prickled at Bucky’s eyes. He sobbed, overwhelmed and ecstatic, and he heard himself chanting “Fuck me fuck me fuck me” to the wolf.

The width of the knot scared Bucky, as Capwolf was fucking him so hard it was clearly pressing for entry, but he wanted it at the same time. He could take it. He would take it. He took a deep, shivering breath and pushed back hard and screamed as it punched through his ring to slide all the way inside. The knot shoved up hard against his prostate and Bucky came like being hit by a truck—but Capwolf only growled and kept pounding, at first just jerking Bucky’s helpless body back and forth but soon pulling the knot free and fucking it back inside.

Capwolf snarled; Bucky sobbed and begged; they fucked like frantic, feral beasts. His ass burned and tingled with pleasure as his hole stretched wide again and again until it finally loosened enough for Capwolf to fuck him as hard and fast as he wanted with only token resistance. But was he just imagining things or was it starting to get even bigger as the wolf took him?

“Close,” Capwolf warned, and suddenly Bucky remembered his research of the day. He whimpered and pushed back again.

“Get the big part in me,” he panted.

“Trying,” Capwolf rumbled back. A few more deep, furious thrusts; Capwolf held Bucky tight and pushed into him as deep as he could go while still thrusting, and Bucky  _ shrieked _ as the knot grew to its full, frankly terrifying size. It felt like it doubled inside him. It was going to split him open, it was too much, too fast! At the same time the tip extended deeper, the shaft grew thicker, and finally Capwolf came, so hard that even deep inside his colon Bucky felt the jets of come splash in his guts.

“Oh god, oh god, it’s so big,” Bucky sobbed. It was like the training cone, only on the inside; his hole was closed up around a narrow length beneath the knot that throbbed with every shot of come. His cock spurted and he shuddered and moaned. The pressure on his prostate was mind-bending.

“So good,” Capwolf purred. 

He tried to pull back, but discovered they were stuck together.  _ Knotted, _ Bucky remembered from his embarrassing search results.  _ He tied me like a bitch. _

His guts were so full, and Capwolf was still coming. Bucky whimpered, “Blessed fucking Mary, Steve, how are you not done?”

“Dunno. But your pussy feels so, so good.” Capwolf was panting above him; he lowered Bucky onto the bed, and Bucky slumped down with his ass up high in the air.

Bucky winced, coming back to himself a little. “Based on what I read about wolves I think we might be here a while.”

“Fine by me.” Capwolf gave him tender licks across his sweaty back and the side of his face. Still coming, holy fuck. The knot seemed to keep it from seeping back out as he filled Bucky up.

Bucky measured his breaths. The werewolf’s scalding-hot knot and tremendous cock were still foremost on his mind, but he let himself float on the pleasure of being so thoroughly used, paying special attention to the shots of semen steadily flooding his guts like a hot, thick enema. The knot throbbed hard with every spurt, right on top of his prostate gland. He was dizzy with pressure and pleasure and heat, Bucky didn’t hear his lover speak at first.

“Hmm?” he asked muzzily.

“Touch yourself for me,” Capwolf repeated himself. “I want to feel you come on my cock again.”

“Yes sir,” Bucky murmured. He reached down to stroke his drooling cock with his metal hand. With so much pressure on his prostate forcing a steady stream of precome out of him already, it was easy to do as Capwolf asked. He squirmed on the knot, ass muscles tensing and squeezing as he shuddered his way through another orgasm.

Capwolf barked out a shout of pleasure as Bucky’s body tensed around him, and his hips bucked a few times, making Bucky wail. “Love breeding you,” he growled once he settled down again.

Bucky decided on the spot that he loved being bred. He sucked in his stomach and looked down: he could actually see the outline of Steve’s cock inside him, faintly, and he moaned happily about it.

As time wore on, Steve’s cock spurted less and less frequently. Bucky estimated at least ten minutes before the cock and knot shrank back down to their normal size and Capwolf slipped out of Bucky’s ass. He groaned and kept it up high, relishing the strange, warm feeling of being pumped full of such a ridiculous amount of come. It felt a bit bloaty, but in a pleasant way. If he didn’t know any better he’d swear his belly had a slight bulge to it now.

For a long moment he was totally insensate to what was going on around him. To his surprise, Capwolf pressed something new against his stretched-out hole: one of his biggest plugs. It locked into place inside him just like the knot, though it felt cold by comparison. He groaned in pleasure, both at being full again and at the understanding that Capwolf wanted him to keep his mess inside.

Capwolf leaned over to lick his tear-tracked cheek. “I’ll be ready for round two in a minute,” he promised.

“Round two?!” Bucky’s mouth went dry. It was going to be a long, long night.

* * *

Sunlight falling across Bucky’s face rudely interrupted his sleep. He yawned and took stock of his surroundings. Steve was human again, one arm snug and protective around Bucky’s midsection. They were awkwardly lumped together on account of the bed frame being broken. The sheets were littered with gold-colored fur and thoroughly ruined by claw marks and copious fluids, mostly-dried. The rest of the furniture was in disarray. There were gouges and stains on the wall. And Bucky himself was...frankly, he  _ ached _ , not the least of which was his bloated stomach and wrecked asshole weakly straining to hold a plug inside.

Good way to wake up, he decided.

Steve looked practically angelic in his sleep. Bucky’s heart fluttered at the sight of him, peaceful and serene, long eyelashes brushing his cheeks. No one would ever suspect him for the filth-talking, feral sex machine he was last night, or the kinky bastard who made his lover sleep with a gut full of his semen. That Steve was Bucky’s and Bucky’s alone. He was something Bucky got to hoard all to himself.

Waking up before Steve was still strange. Of the two of them, Steve was definitely the morning person. Usually he was up before the sun. Mornings after a full moon were a different story. Bucky had latched onto his other half’s post-wolf exhaustion as a great excuse to sleep in—and get first dibs on the shower.

He limped that way and started the water, rubbing his swollen belly. If it weren’t for that he might have believed he’d dreamed how much Capwolf came, between the five or so times they fucked the night before. Pride swelled in him for holding so much of Steve’s mess inside himself...but it was really, really time for that plug to come out. Had he not been literally fucked into exhaustion last night, getting to sleep with a plug in would not have been in the cards in the first place.

The bathroom itself was a mess from where they’d tried to clean up and ended up fucking again.

Gingerly, under a nice hot spray, Bucky eased the plug back out. The deluge of gelatinized come that came gushing out with it was frankly rather gross, but satisfying in a nasty sort of way. Bucky took a deep breath and pushed down on his belly to try to force more out. It took a while, and even after he was done he had the sneaking suspicion there was still a fair amount of semen in his guts. He’d have to wear a smaller plug throughout the day lest he risk ruining his pants.

He marveled at it, this sign of how thoroughly Capwolf had used him, how he’d opened himself to his lover’s monstrousness and taken all he had to give. Knowing he’d served as the werewolf’s come dumpster sent a dirty thrill up his spine. Bucky carefully fingered the softened rim of his hole, feeling where it gaped when he flexed; he couldn’t help but slip a few fingers inside. Even as sore as he was it felt so damn good to rub and stretch that ring of muscle. His cock took notice straight away, as it always did when he had something inside him. If he bent right he could probably fist himself, but he wasn’t awake enough for that, so he made do with four fingers up his cunt and his other hand wrapped around his cock. He let his mind drift back to how it got so stretched out: how badly Capwolf wanted him, how possessively Capwolf took him. Before long he came on the memory of Capwolf’s knot and the water washed his spunk away.

After toweling off he slipped a plug inside easily enough. If he and Steve could both stay out of his ass, he figured, it should be mostly tight again by nightfall.

Steve’s phone rang while Bucky was getting pants on. Steve mumbled but didn’t wake up, so Bucky answered.

“Morning, Barnes,” Sam said on the other line. “Y’all forget about training this morning?”

Bucky cussed. “Yeah kinda. Steve’s still asleep, I just got outta the shower. Long night, with the, y’know.”

“Right, right. What about you, you coming?”

Bucky rummaged for a shirt. “Can’t this morning, I’ve got BPS.”

Sam made a disgusted noise. “Aw man, I didn’t need to know—”

Bucky sniffed haughtily. “I’ll have you know Busted Pussy Syndrome is a serious affliction that affects one out of every two supersoldiers.”

“Ya nasty,” Sam declared, and they rescheduled for  _ after _ the full moon. It took till after that for Sam to catch an important detail. “Barnes...if he was wolfed out last night, and you’ve got BPS this morning….”

“What’s that? Can’t hear you, you’re breaking up, better call back later,” Bucky chirped, and hung up on him.

Next up was fixing a huge breakfast spread. Big breakfasts after strenuous nights were kind of their thing. Under normal circumstances it would be Steve waking Bucky up to a morning feast, but there was great pleasure to be had in turning the tables every now and then. Eventually the smells of coffee and sizzling sausages brought Steve shuffling out of the bedroom, yawning, hair adorably ruffled. He wrapped himself around Bucky from behind where he stood at the stove and nuzzled into his neck.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Bucky cooed.

“Morning,” Steve mumbled. He kissed Bucky’s pulse and asked, almost timid, “Are you okay?”

Bucky turned to smooch Steve’s forehead. “Peachy keen.”

“No, I mean. Last night. Was what we did...alright? Did I hurt you? Did I go too far?” Steve pulled back a bit to search Bucky’s face with his brow knitted.

A warm smile spread across Bucky’s face, and he kissed Steve’s nose this time. “Yes, no, and no. I am pleasantly sore and looking forward to the next time we can do that again. Gonna be shitting jizz for a week, though.”

Steve laughed, startled. He slipped his hand under Bucky’s shirt and rubbed a fond hand across his stomach. “I seem to recall you looking real good with a full belly,” Steve rumbled.

Bucky squirmed out of his arms and wagged the spatula at him. “Oh no you don’t. I know that look, and you’ve gotta give me time to heal up before you try any more funny business.”

Steve’s brows rose and he tried to play all apple-pie-America’s-son innocent, but James Barnes knew him better than that. What he wasn’t expecting was Steve ducking his head and saying, “If you’re too worn out for the usual, we could try it the other way around for a change.”

Bucky thought about it as he stirred eggs. It wasn’t often that he got a hankering to top, and it wasn’t often that Steve felt like bottoming, and the two coincided rarely enough that they usually made do with toys to supplement their standard activities. It was rather tempting.

But no, he put his foot down about it. “No, no sex for  _ at least _ three days. My back feels like I’m fifty.”

“You’re a lot older than that, pal,” Steve chuckled warmly. 

Bucky reached back to swat Steve’s thigh. “Not consecutively, you little shit.”

“Mm. Guess I’ll just have to find other ways to make you feel good.” Steve was so earnest Bucky couldn’t look him in the face, so he turned, blushing, to finish breakfast with his insides all bubbly and warm.

They moved back to the city afterward. Their suite at the compound needed repairs anyway. No sooner did they get unpacked than Steve guided Bucky to the bed and laid him out for a full-body massage. A couple of times there Bucky drifted off to sleep, it was so good. Steve drew him a bath afterward and washed his hair for him, heavy on the scalp massage, and Bucky fell asleep in his hands yet again. They took it as a sign and napped together; Bucky awoke feeling like a million bucks with Steve worshipfully tracing the lines of his body.

He had himself a good man. He let himself stare at Steve, just floating in the moment of his sensual yet nonsexual touch, marveling at how lucky he was to get this third chance at life with him. He reached out to Steve and got a tender kiss on his metal hand, then shoulder, neck, cheek, lips. Steve could make his toes curl even without using tongue, even without getting him aroused. His body was so full of love it felt like he might burst if he didn’t say it again and again.

They cuddled on the couch for a few movies—lighthearted things where no one died. It had always confused Bucky that people—civilians—seemed to think that soldiers and veterans would want to watch war movies all the time. They’d both seen more than enough of the real thing. Bring on the fluffy comedies.

They necked a little here and there, but Steve never tried to make it racy, and Bucky spilled over with love and trust for his man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this was satisfying after all that build-up. Bucky sure thought so. 😏 BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!


	9. Lab Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and friends learn a number of terrible things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s still Monday somewhere, right...?

Sam kept them busy with training and drinks the following day. Bucky was fending off pointed questions about what the _hell_ they were thinking sleeping together “under those circumstances” when a text message distracted him.

_This is why we don’t go after Darvner directly. The golden goose laid another egg._

It was the first time she’d ever let him in on who she got her intel from. He took a moment to appreciate the unspoken gesture before speaking up.

“Hey guys,” he interrupted, “Nat’s source came through. She and Clint are suiting up.”

Steve sobered immediately. “Do we need to come in?”

Bucky bit his lip, trading texts, then shook his head. “Some BS about us having too many ‘personal stakes,’ whatever the fuck that means. But they’re gonna keep me in the loop.”

“Sure,” Sam said a little too casually. In spite of Nat’s abnormally informative text, it pinged Bucky’s paranoia something fierce.

“Yeah,” he agreed gloomily. “For Nat’s value of ‘in the loop.’”

Steve frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam and Bucky shared a look. “Nat’s solid,” Sam said, “there’s no disputing that, but she’s not exactly what anyone would call ‘forthcoming,’ you know that.”

Steve made a noise of reluctant agreement. Still, he insisted, “C’mon, guys, she’s on our side.”

“I know,” Bucky said gently, “and I’m glad for that, but I’m still not getting my hopes up for full disclosure. Surely you can relate.”

Steve gave them a stubborn shrug, jaw set. “I trust her. She’s reliable.”

Bucky sighed and dropped the subject. He knew what he could trust Nat for. She just showed that she trusted him. At heart it wasn’t so much trust in _her_ he was lacking.

* * *

They’d made it back to their apartment (well, floor, really) and settled into the couch with popcorn and a musical when the next texts came in. The first one said simply, _Found him._ What followed was a series of photos. Blood drained from Bucky’s face and he asked Steve, quietly, to pause the movie.

“Hmm?” Steve looked over. “Buck, what’s wrong?”

He handed over his phone and watched Steve blanch as well. 

“Oh my god,” Steve whispered.

The photos showed another lab lined in cages. Inside some were animals. Inside others were what looked like they _used_ to be animals, or were supposed to become them. Their misshapen bodies were horrid amalgams of man and beast, limbs and faces contorted in agony, reaching for whichever one of the spies had been holding the camera.

Bucky’s phone buzzed again as a video came through. In motion, it was so much worse. Some of the...test subjects, victims, were in a state of constant mutation, writhing and moaning as their bodies shifted, melted, stretched, sprouted and lost hair or scales.

The sounds they made were the worst thing of all.

“Looks like you lucked out,” Bucky said in numb horror. Steve retched. But Bucky’s mind was already racing. He remembered...a building on fire, a man peeling off his face— “The serum. It worked on you because of the serum.”

“That doesn’t really make me feel better,” Steve croaked. He was already pawing for his own phone, presumably to contact Fury. “We need to put an end to that.”

Bucky leaned over to kiss Steve’s temple. “I’ll get suited up.”

* * *

  
Dr. Interpose’s new lab was another repurposed bunker, this time in Missouri. They found it more lightly staffed than the last one. Bucky assumed it was harder to find scientists willing to work on something so blatantly—fuck unethical, this was _evil_. There were armed goons here and there, and they were easy to take out. What they weren’t prepared for was the fact that the laboratory staff released failed experiments as cannon fodder.

The place was a house of horrors. With each room they stormed they found themselves faced with a new rabid, shrieking abomination, crawling and slithering towards them with raw-skinned jaws snapping in mindless rage. They were all mad with bloodlust and pain, as ferocious as Capwolf, if thankfully neither as strong nor as coordinated. For once Bucky found himself deliberately staying at range and relying on his CZ Scorpion. He tried to be humane about it, he really did; but with many of the nightmare beasts they found themselves up against, it was difficult to discern anatomy that would give him a swift kill. It didn’t help that they seemed fairly resistant to bullets, which would have made him wonder around Capwolf if he’d had a moment to think.

Resistant to _his_ bullets, that is. Nat, conversely, seemed to have a much easier time about taking them down, as did Clint. Why would an arrow through the eye kill when a bullet there didn’t?

Bucky hung back as they advanced and wrenched an arrow out of some poor wretch’s deformed, spiny back. Or, god, he _thought_ it was the creature’s back, but its spine was so twisted and its limbs didn’t connect right so it was hard to tell. The arrow looked normal except for—

He saw red.

But he couldn’t make a scene of it right now.

He snapped the arrowhead off, pocketed it, and brought up the rear. Stark was blasting what might have once been an alligator, or maybe a man, off his leg. The laser sliced through flesh and bone, making it sizzle and reek; with its head bisected, the body fell away, but the jaws remained clamped shut thanks to its teeth being embedded in Stark’s armor. The suit threw off sparks where the creature had crushed the metal. Bucky could only imagine what his leg looked like under there.

“Get back,” Steve ordered, “take mid. Stay at range and stay off that leg if you can help it.”

Stark tried to retort by firing up his foot boosters, but the damaged one just threw off more sparks and sputtered out. “Right, point taken,” he said.

“Hold still,” Bucky told Stark as he jogged up. He carefully pried the beast’s jaws out of the armor. 

Stark choked back a groan. There was blood coming through in places. “Those things really pack a punch.”

“Got a feeling we ain’t seen the worst of it,” Bucky muttered.

In the next room Bucky shot a whitecoat through the elbow as she reached for a cage release. She howled in pain and the writhing creatures behind bars howled with her. A thing that looked like a chimpanzee caught mid-change into a dog of some kind screamed and grabbed her through the grate, clawing and biting as best it could. Her ineffectual thrashing sprayed blood on the walls and floor. Steve knocked her out cold, dragged her away—the creature pulled away a scrap of scalp with her hair—and left her cuffed on the floor for cleanup to deal with afterward.

Nat put a bullet between the ape-thing’s two and a half eyes and it crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut. Bucky’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

This compound was smaller than the last one, for all it was objectively worse. Bucky silently thanked whoever was listening for that. He wasn’t sure his sanity would hold if there were three floors to this nightmare. It only took about twenty minutes from entry for the team to corner the mad doctor himself in a room lined with cages, each housing a slavering mutation. These abominations looked moderately more successful than the ones in previous rooms—still twisted and grotesque, all patchy hair, exposed muscle, and throbbing skin, shivering in pain and howling in rage as they banged on their cage walls and groped blindly between the bars, but their forms were at the very least stable. Dr. Interpose himself half-cowered behind a metal gurney with a bone saw in hand.

“You have no _concept_ of the value of the work you’re destroying,” the madman bellowed in his strange, reedy voice. “I would think you of all people, Captain _Rrrrogers,_ ” (he said, rolling the R), “would appreciate that I’m following in Dr. Erskine’s very footsteps, creating a new breed of soldier for a better world! Tell me, tell me, did the serum take? Why, you look downright _normal_ still! Tell me! What do you become when the moon is full?”

“You won’t be around to find out,” Steve growls. “Come quietly and this will go a lot better for you than the alternative.”

Dr. Interpose guffawed. “The al _ter_ native is I lose several months of research, but it seems you’ve seen to that already. That is _fine!_ I’ll simply start again! Here, come meet your siblings!”

Bucky tracked him reaching for a cage release level like they’d seen in previous rooms. “Oh no you fucking don’t,” he muttered, and shot the motherfucker through the knee. Interpose dropped like a sack of hammers.

Steve saluted Bucky (“Don’t salute your sniper, Steve”) and cuffed the mad scientist, who continued ranting about the importance of his work until Steve shook him like a ragdoll. “I’m only interested in hearing one thing out of you,” he snarled. “How do you reverse it?”

Dr. Interpose tittered. “Reverse— _reverse_ it?! Why in hell would I make it reversible? Do these creatures look like the formula could be reversed to you? Enjoy life with fur, Captain, it’s my gift to you!”

Steve punched his lights out.

* * *

There was some debate among the Avengers team as to what would become of the lab. Stark was vocally torn on the destruction of so much science, but even he couldn’t justify allowing this to continue. This, they all concluded, was definitely evil science.

Nat still downloaded all she could from each computer before they torched the place (after removing the humans, of course).

SHIELD agents hustled Dr. Interpose away almost the moment they landed back at the compound. Steve and Bucky shared an uneasy look.

“So what happens to Gilliam now?” Steve demanded as soon as he could, which turned out to be during debrief.

Fury eyed him critically. “He’ll be kept in SHIELD custody for now. Don’t concern yourself with the judiciary proceedings. Just trust that he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

Hair stood on the back of Bucky’s neck. “The last time a mad scientist was remanded to SHIELD custody,” he sniped back, “I woke up with a metal arm.”

Fury glared at him for a moment. “I understand your misgivings, but let me make myself clear. This is not Operation Paperclip. SHIELD has changed.”

“Has it?” He stood, pulled Clint’s bloodstained arrowhead out of his belt pouch, and slammed it onto the table. “How long after finding out what silver does to Capwolf did SHIELD start arming its agents with it?”

Steve went ashen. Tony went red-faced on the screen from medical. Both Clint and Nat remained stoic, but suddenly neither of them would look the others in the eye.

Fury, for his part, was characteristically unmoved. “We’ve only taken what precautions we’ve deemed necessary.”

Steve set his jaw, and his eyes were fire. “I understand. SHIELD has always been in the business of having the upper hand on everyone.”

“There are protocols for all of us, Steve,” Nat pointed out coolly, though Bucky knew her well enough to see unease in the lines of her body. “This shouldn’t be a surprise. If SHIELD wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

“SHIELD tried to take me out before I was a werewolf,” Steve shot back. “How’d that work out for them?”

“That’s enough,” Fury cut in. “This conversation is over. If anyone has questions about their role in this organization you can schedule an appointment. Dismissed.”

Clint lingered long enough to say, “You gotta know it’s not personal, man. They weren’t for you.”

“This time,” Bucky hissed.

“When it’s _my_ arrows? Every time. We’re on the same side, Cap.” With that, he left. Natasha had already slipped away.

“I don’t like this,” Bucky muttered to Steve once they were fully alone. “It’s too familiar. I don’t like this at all.”

Steve threw a comforting arm around his shoulder. “SHIELD rooted out Hydra,” he reminded Bucky. “They rebuilt from the ground up. It’s not the same as it was. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, you know that.”

They’d had this conversation many times, back when Bucky was surfacing from his trauma and groping for his place in the future. The scaffolds of confidence they’d built up over time were swaying dangerously underfoot, as if someone had taken out a primary support. Or, Bucky pondered, more like they’d removed one minor strut after another until the whole thing started to list. How long before he had to choose between falling and jumping off?

“Then they’re following in their own footsteps,” Bucky pressed. “Steve, they were carrying _silver_.”

“Clint and Natasha are our friends, Bucky. They wouldn’t turn on me.” Steve didn’t look as sure as he sounded.

”If not them, there are plenty of SHIELD agents who aren’t.”

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it again, and sighed through his nose. “Alright, I’ll admit I don’t like the idea that they have that on me, even if it’s only three nights a month.”

Bucky leaned into him. “I can relate,” he said quietly; “I know how much it sucks knowing your masters have specific plans for how to kill you.”

And Steve couldn’t argue with that...or didn’t want to.

* * *

Stark’s lab was even more chaotic than Dr. Interpose’s, in a way, but the only screaming being done there was the heavy metal playing from hidden speakers. Bucky slunk in, wincing at the volume. Stark usually only listened to music this loud when he was either upset, eyeball-deep in his work, or both. He was the kind of person who dove into his work when upset, so by Bucky’s reckoning it was probably usually both.

At the moment he was welding something on a stool. His leg was in a brace with LEDs glowing along its length. It probably needed to be in a cast, but knowing Stark, he probably argued his way into wearing something of his own design instead of listening to medical opinions. Bucky kinda had to respect that, even if it was a familiar kind of frustrating.

Stark killed the torch and lifted his face shield. “Need something? Kinda busy here.”

Bucky winced. This wasn’t going to be easy. “I uh. Sorry.”

“You’re right, I’m always busy,” Stark said, leaving Bucky blinking. “Come on, out with it, you’ve already interrupted my flow so you may as well say whatever it is you came to say.”

“Sorry,” Bucky repeated. The metal arm’s plates shifted with his unease. “I need a favor. Off the record.”

Now that caught Stark’s interest. He beckoned Bucky over. “And whose record are we keeping this favor off of?”

“SHIELD’s,” he said quietly, but the music was so loud he had to repeat himself louder.

Stark regarded him for a moment. “FRIDAY, take the volume to a 3 and activate privacy protocols.”

“You got it, boss,” the walls replied. The music lowered to a dull roar and the glass walls grew cloudy. That never ceased to amaze Bucky. Stark looked at him expectantly.

He raised his metal hand and flexed his fingers. “I need a scan done of this. Comprehensive, confidential.”

Stark shifted in his seat. As much as their company chafed, he was fascinated by Bucky’s prosthesis, and always itching to get his fingers into it. But he was a shrewd one, eager as he was. “I’ve been wanting to do that for two years now. What changed?”

Bucky felt his face grow dour. “Our employer moved some goalposts. I want— I _need_ to know if there are tracking devices, or remote controls, or kill switches in here. Like there were before.”

When he was wandering around wondering who the fuck he was in the wake of Insight Day he’d found Hydra’s tracking device and kill switch himself and destroyed them. In the time he’d been working for SHIELD, though, he’d allowed himself to be lulled into letting their doctors put him under general anaesthesia once or twice. He couldn’t stop thinking about it now.

Stark gave him a grim look of understanding that made Bucky dare to hope. Tony was a fierce individualist to a fault. Maybe he’d started wondering what the protocols were for him. That might explain the sudden bout of upgrades beyond repairing his damaged armor.

“I just. I don’t trust anymore that they haven’t installed something in me when they had the chance,” Bucky finished quietly.

“It’d be understandable if they did,” Stark said casually, and _wow_ that stung. He had a talent for that. Those thorns and barbs again. But he went right on: “That table. Hop on up.”

It couldn’t have been coincidence that Stark didn’t have him sit in a chair instead, so there was that. Bucky would take what he could get. He sat on the edge of the metal table, looking around at all the technological wonders and car parts surrounding him. It really was a shame they couldn’t get along. Bucky did love technology, for all his complicated feelings about having it bolted to his spine.

“FRIDAY, run a full scan on the arm, full spectrum, detail...six, with diagnostics,” Stark told his AI.

Lights from hidden cameras criss-crossed Bucky’s body, focused on the metal arm. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. When he opened them again, FRIDAY was projecting a three-dimensional model of his prosthesis into the air. Still perched on his stool, Stark gestured through the hologram, moving parts aside into an exploded view.

“Highlight anything that looks like a sensor,” Stark said. Parts lit up in red: fingertips, palm, gyroscopes...a few other bits and bobs. “Isolate anything relaying a non-biological signal.” Most of the red parts went blue, except….

“Motherfucker, I knew it,” Bucky hissed, grabbing his metal shoulder. Buried under his plating and layers of gears and mechanical muscle, a tiny circular thing glowed red.

“FRIDAY, analyze that for me,” Stark said, tone gone dark.

“It appears to be a model FG-264 Mk IV GPS tracking device,” the AI said, “standard SHIELD issue with an upgrade.”

“Son of a bitch, they really did it,” Stark muttered. “Any concerns for removal?”

“The Mk IV sends a distress signal if the unit is damaged or the pressure plate is triggered by removal.”

Bucky cussed again. “So you take that out and SHIELD knows about it right away?”

“For now.” Stark met his eyes. For all he taunted Bucky earlier, he looked _furious_ . Aside from letting him live in the Tower, being angry on Bucky’s behalf was the nicest thing Stark had ever done for him. “I’ll find a way to get it out. Just give me a day or two. FRIDAY, I want a scan on all my suits and equipment, looking for any _additional_ FG-264s.”

“Scanning.”

A moment passed. Bucky slipped off the table.

“You’re not going to like this, boss,” the AI said.

Stark cursed loudly and threw his welding torch, making Bucky flinch. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll find a fucking way.”

Bucky hustled out of there, flinching again at the crashes of equipment being overturned.

* * *

Nat met him for lunch the day after. Their conversation was light enough to start, but simmering with things left unsaid. They got onto the topic of surveillance, and Bucky ground his teeth and took the lid off to show what was boiling underneath.

“Nat, I need you to be completely honest with me for a minute,” he said carefully. “Did you know that SHIELD is tracking me?”

She chose her words carefully as ever. “SHIELD keeps tabs on all of us. Maybe closer than we’re comfortable with, but that’s the name of the game. As their operatives it’s SHIELD’s job to know where we are.”

He shook his head. “No, Nat, I mean did you know about the tracking device.”

Her face betrayed nothing save for the wrinkling of her brow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Nat, _did you know about the fucking tracking device they put in my arm?_ ”

To an outsider, the Black Widow would have looked as impartial as a statue; but Bucky knew her microexpressions, and to him, her shock and sudden anger were as plain as day. “No,” she said slowly, “I didn’t know.”

His umbrage at her melted a little more. She placed a hand over his and said, meaningfully, “I’m on your side, _Stariná Volk_.”

Bucky chewed his lip, taking her hand. “I _thought_ I knew who was on my side. Now I’m not so sure.”

Nat studied him. “Are we still friends?”

He looked up into her eyes. “I want to be.”

She squeezed his hand and they sat in silence for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You ever notice how with mad scientist stories there’s always an antidote or antiviral or some other cure for the bad guy’s bio/chemical weapon conveniently lying around?
> 
> Fuck that.


	10. Bodily Autonomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where some things are said that aren't meant, and since things are said that very much are.

There were setbacks to removing the tracking device from his arm. It wasn’t that Stark wasn’t confident he could do it; it was more that Bucky had panic attacks every time he sat down to let Stark work on him. They put it on hold for the moment.

The month passed with ever-mounting tension. Once Steve started getting aggressive in advance of his wolfing, he and Bucky played a lot of grabass, until Bucky made a misstep.

Steve had Bucky pressed up against a wall with his knee between Bucky’s legs and was biting at his neck. Bucky held on for dear life, ready to go go go, and he groaned, “God I’m looking forward to the full moon.”

Wrong answer, apparently. Steve recoiled so fast Bucky nearly lost his balance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bucky reeled. “The sex, Steve, I’m looking forward to having sex with you again as Capwolf. The thing you seem to want most those nights.”

“Is that all it is for you now?” Steve accused him. “You think it’s  _ easy _ on me just because the wolf wants you? Is he just another way for you to get your rocks off?”

Bucky’s jaw dropped. “Where is this coming from? Steve are you—are you accusing me of _ objectifying _ you?”

Steve stepped back. “If the shoe fits. I wonder if you even  _ want _ me to be cured now that it’s fun for you.”

Steve might as well have slapped him. Bucky put a finger in his face. “That’s not fair. You can’t act like you have no part in this. You _ seduced me _ and now you’re mad at me for liking it?! Excuse me for trying to find some good in a shit situation, Steve!”

His lover turned to storm off but Bucky followed. “How is it any different from this?” He held up his metal hand. “I didn’t want this either, and SHIELD wants me to use it to be their weapon, and some days the only reason I don’t rip it out of my body is the fact that you don’t treat me like an unlovable, unfuckable _ monster _ for what a mad scientist did to my body!”

Steve flinched. Bucky felt downright savage. “So I’m  _ sorry _ if my attempts to give you the same thing are  _ offensive _ now! If you don’t want to fuck me as the wolf, don’t fuck me, but you are  _ not _ gonna stand there and act like you haven’t been  _ trying _ to fuck me as the wolf from the very start.”

“Bucky—”

“I don’t wanna fucking hear it right now, Steve.” He whirled, grabbed a coat to fend off the November chill, and stormed out of the apartment, ignoring Steve calling for him as he slammed the door.

Once he found himself on a rooftop overlooking the city, he let himself cry it out.

Eventually, through his hurt, sullen mulling, he allowed that Steve did have a point. Bucky was benefitting from Steve’s lycanthropy without considering whether or not he  _ wanted _ to be a werewolf. Bucky was okay with it, now more than ever with Steve able to contain the wolf-rage on his own; but he needed to be able to show that his respect for his other half outweighed his lust.

He had some research to do.

* * *

When the full moon came, they didn’t fuck, but sparred instead.

Normally they were pretty evenly matched. With the superior serum, Steve’s physical capabilities were just a little better than Bucky’s, but Bucky had the benefits of a metal arm that could rip the door off a car like a Tupperware lid and a dozen different fighting styles implanted in his head.

Capwolf, however, wiped the floor with him.

They went round after round hand-to-hand, and every time he found himself submitting: crushed in Capwolf’s arms, or pinned under his paws, or caught in his killing jaws that were  _ just _ gentle enough not to break skin. Even when he got the upper hand on Capwolf, Bucky found himself outmatched. He wasn’t strong enough to choke him, nor sturdy enough to tire him, nor fast enough to fake him out.

It was still a turn-on, there were no two ways about it, but after their fight he wasn’t about to make the first move. He swallowed his moan as Capwolf ground him into the mat and deliberately did not grind his hips. It was torture—but he’d endured far worse.

It took a few hours for them to exhaust each other in the ring. By the time they were both panting, the ring itself was rather worse for wear.

“Okay, alright, I’m done,” Bucky heaved. “How about a different sort of exercise? Something SHIELD hasn’t tried yet.”

Capwolf tilted his head in curiosity.

What Bucky had in mind was a new battery of tests. Instead of drawing blood and taking scans, he laid out a duffel full of equipment he’d gathered over the last few days. With Capwolf’s consent, he did...all manner of silly things, really.

He tried smacking Capwolf in the head three times with a crucifix, and the same with a knife, but he stubbornly remained a werewolf—not so much as a twitch. He tried, with no small amount of difficulty, piercing his palms with nails. He called Capwolf by his full name; they took to the showers to put him under running water, the only notable results of which were discovering that Capwolf had a dog’s instinct to shake off when wet, soaking Bucky for the discovery, and that he smelled strongly of wet dog. Bucky tried yelling at him and exposing him to wolfsbane. There was some folklore, Bucky pointed out, that indicated  _ eating _ wolfsbane as a treatment, but they waffled on that one. It was poisonous to begin with, and the legends varied as to whether it was supposed to cure a werewolf or kill him. They decided against it in the end.

“Anything else?” Capwolf rumbled, tail thumping weakly.

Bucky ran both hands through his hair. “That’s everything I could find. I guess if it was anything as simple as folklore, Dr. Strange would have known about it.”

Capwolf’s tail kept wagging. “I appreciate that you tried.”

They ran together in the snowy woods the rest of the night, testing Capwolf’s will against his instincts: to race off after prey; to mount Bucky and take him. He successfully resisted both.

* * *

Bucky was increasingly uneasy about the fact that they were still spending full moons at the Avengers compound, but really what choice did they have? Staying cooped up made Capwolf stir crazy, and they couldn’t well just turn him loose in Central Park. Training made the burden an easier one to bear.

The second night, more of the Avengers got in on training with Capwolf—and this time he brought the shield. After quickly learning he’d wipe them out if he got close enough, they remained at range to control his movements. It was like herding a cat. Without Thor or the Hulk, none of them had the raw strength to bring Capwolf down, and they tired faster than he did. He really was the perfect predator in that form. But no predator is invincible: with a seriously concerted effort, and Wanda cheating in Bucky’s opinion, the Avengers present managed to bring Capwolf to a stalemate.

He seemed high off it afterward, shifting his weight from paw to paw as Bucky emerged from the showers.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky said, knuckling Capwolf’s jaw, “you did good, kid.”

“You owe me for the suit you ruined,” Stark chirped on his way out too.

“More than my pension,” Capwolf rumbled, not looking sorry at all.

They went night-running again. Worn out from the mock-battle, they took the woods at an easy jog, an ideal cool-down exercise, especially given the freezing temperature. Bucky was fine with a jacket, but Capwolf was in his element: covered in a double coat of thick fur, he didn’t even shiver, despite the way his breath steamed.

Bucky chugged through the snow, leapt over a log, ducked branches, dodged trees, and suddenly realized: Capwolf wasn’t beside him anymore. He looked back over his shoulder just in time to get scooped up into the werewolf’s arms.

Capwolf jogged to a halt and set Bucky back on his feet in a spot where a tree had blocked the snowfall, but didn’t let him go. 

“Can’t take it anymore,” he growled, pushing his hips forward so Bucky could feel what was bothering him. “Need you. Need to breed you.”

Bucky moaned. He didn’t need to be told twice. He shuffled out of his pants, already half-hard (temperature be damned), as Capwolf did the same. He hit his knees in the damp leaves and pulled Capwolf’s length to his mouth so he could suck the flaccid tip and stroke it free of its sheath, knot and all. Capwolf hauled him up by his ribs and flipped him over; Bucky grabbed both wrists to hang on as he found himself held precariously bent over.

“Wait,” he panted, “Promise me you won’t get mad at me later.”

“Sorry. Make it up to you now.” Capwolf licked his back and slid his cock up and down Bucky’s cleft until it found his hole and slid easily inside.

Bucky cried out at the sudden stretch. Capwolf got most of his length inside Bucky in the first thrust, and it made Bucky dizzy to be so full of cock all at once. He squirmed his hips to get a good angle that would let Capwolf straighten his guts and squeezed around the shaft. Without further warning Capwolf started pounding his ass like a sledgehammer, if a sledgehammer could be rocket-fast. Bucky howled in pained glee at the way the knot, even deflated, battered at his entrance and stretched him further.

Capwolf kept him wet inside with copious precome. The slick sounds of their joining punctuated the night along with their grunts and groans. The knot bashed its way inside and Bucky could only hang on for dear life as he got fucked with the werewolf’s entire length, slowly-swelling knot and all. He arched his back up and reached down to feel his belly bulge where his beastly lover’s cock slid home inside his clutching guts. Capwolf fucked him faster and faster, faster and harder, and grunted and growled as his cock grew and grew till he was long enough to mimic getting fisted to the elbow, thick as Bucky’s wrist, and wide as both his fists where his knot tied Bucky tight. Bucky groaned as Capwolf started flooding him, entire body growing taut, balls drawn tight, and he came, shouting  _ Yes Steve yes _ and was answered with claws digging furrows in his hips.

He let Capwolf hold him there through the long minutes of being knotted. Bucky’s mind drifted into the past: he remembered, hazily, fucking in a forest before, the tall pines straight and black against the snow. The European Theater. They’d done this before, albeit more furtive and less strange.

He came twice more well before that monster cock started to deflate, each time sagging more limply in Capwolf’s grasp till he was all but hanging off the knot.

“God I love how big you are inside me,” Bucky purred. “Love how you fill me up, baby. You get me so fuckin’ wet.”

“Love how you wrap around me,” Capwolf rumbled back, licking him tenderly. He eased Bucky down and tugged his cock free—it took a couple tries, each making Bucky squawk because the knot wasn’t deflated completely yet, but it finally came free with a wet gush of come. Capwolf rummaged through his discarded pants. Bucky assumed he was just putting them back on, but then something cool and hard popped into his asshole—a plug!

“Ohmygod, warn a guy next time,” he laughed breathlessly. “Have...wait a minute. Have you had that in your pocket this entire time?!”

Capwolf licked his face in reply...and then silenced anything else Bucky had to say by licking him thoroughly clean.

Bucky’s legs were jelly by the time they were done, but somehow he managed to get his pants and shoes back on. Capwolf got down on all fours and gestured with his snout. It took Bucky a moment to realize he was meant to climb onto his back. They made their way back to the compound in silence for a ways.

“Hey Steve,” Bucky said quietly, after a time. “You ever think about why SHIELD lets us run off on our own like this?”

“Clearly they trust us,” Capwolf grumbled drolly.

Bucky paused for a long moment, then took a deep breath. “They put a tracking device in my arm.”

Capwolf stopped. “What,” he growled.

Bucky shivered at the sound. “Stark found it in my arm. It lets them track me via GPS and sets off an alarm if it gets damaged or taken out. We’re working our way up to removing it, but...you know me and chairs.”

Capwolf shook, growling hard with each rapid exhale. He pawed at the ground, jaws snapping— fuck fuck fuck Bucky recognized this behavior, it was the wolf-rage, he hung on tight and prayed—

“No...no...I am the...rrgh...the bulwark, and the wolf—” Steve shuddered violently and panted for breath, but he calmed down. Bucky set a mental reminder to send Wanda cookies.

“I can’t believe,” Capwolf snarled, pacing, “they would implant something into your body without your consent. Fuck this, fuck them, let’s go AWOL.”

“Steve—”

“I mean it. Say the word and we will leave.”

Tears prickled Bucky’s eyes; he wiped them away. “I know how much wearing the shield means to you. I couldn’t ask you to stop being Captain America just because I’m feeling betrayed.”

“You  _ were _ betrayed, Bucky,” Capwolf snapped. “SHIELD betrayed you. They used me to get you to trust them without them trusting you. Fuck the shield.”

Bucky gasped and straightened. “Steve!”

“It’s a scrap of metal anyone can wield! Sam can have it if he wants it, he would be a good Cap. You matter more to me than anything in this world,” Capwolf growled with great feeling.

Bucky rubbed his eyes again. “Where would we even go?”

Capwolf shook his head like a dog. “Anywhere. We withdraw all our cash and drive away. Buy a cottage in the woods.”

Bucky couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of two city boys like them living in a rural backwater. But he had to admit, as they entered a clearing leading up to the compound: “I don’t know. Sometimes a quiet life sure does sound nice sometimes.”

* * *

Steve came with him to Stark’s shop in the morning. He kept up an easy banter to distract Bucky and keep him from spiralling into panic, asking Bucky’s input here and there as a sneaky way of making him check in. Bucky only half-followed the conversation, so much of his attention was laser-focused on Stark’s hands and tools rooting around in his arm. But at last he felt something pop free, and Stark plopped a little metal disk into his hand. Bucky held it up to look at the tracker, and crushed it between his metal thumb and finger.

Half an hour later he was in Fury’s office, sliding the device across his desk under one finger and leveling a challenging stare at his handler-director.

Fury didn’t flinch. “Do you have something you want to say to me, Agent Barnes?”

Bucky’s jaw and fists clenched. “I don’t know, sir, do you have something you wanna explain to me?”

Fury turned to face him fully. “I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you the risk SHIELD assumes by having you as our operative.”

Bucky blinked and laughed a little. “Your decision to accept a risk doesn’t give you the right to modify my _ body _ against my will. Hydra didn’t have that right, and neither do you.” He poked the broken tracker, breaking it up a little more. “I wanna make something clear right now, Fury. Your scientists are _ never _ touching me again.”

And he left without being dismissed.


	11. Supersoldier Owner's Insurance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the structure of trust collapses beneath you, will you fall or will you jump?

Bad guys always had the worst possible timing. Steve and Bucky were in the middle of an early dinner when AIM goons HALO jumped into an assault on the Avengers compound. Bucky had to admire the nerve of these guys, even if they were completely outclassed; they had managed to wait till there were only three Avengers present to attack.

The trouble was, the sun was setting, and one of those Avengers was a werewolf supersoldier.

The uniformed goons froze and milled about in confusion when Captain America stumbled and started screaming and writhing. Just to be on the safe side, Bucky laid down cover fire. Steve’s mantra became a growl, became snarling, and finally became a howl that could turn a man’s guts to ice. The goons cursed, shouted, screamed, and scattered as Capwolf barreled into them, biting off a few arms and throwing them around like ragdolls.

Aside from those doomed to bleed out from missing limbs, Capwolf showed remarkable restraint during the fight. He only ripped one man’s throat out, and that was only after the guy shot Bucky in the leg. For the most part, he just swatted the shit out of them and laid them out cold. Wanda paused her own assault to pull the bullet out before sprinting off again.

“It’s a feint,” she called on the comms. “They’re trying to storm detention!”

“Interpose,” Capwolf snarled, and raced off that way. Bucky was pretty sure the man who got hit in the side by the shield suffered a broken back for it. He couldn’t bring himself to care.

There were twice as many AIM soldiers at the detention center. It might have taken them a while to get through them if it was just Steve, Bucky, and Wanda, plus various SHIELD agents fighting in pairs. They might have even gotten Dr. Interpose free and spirited him away before the fight was over. Capwolf was a force they had not reckoned with: he cleaved through them like a hot knife through butter, and they were not made of stern enough stuff to stand their ground with a near-seven-foot-tall wolf monster barreling toward them.

The last conscious AIM agent they found had just reached Dr. Interpose’s cell. Bucky rounded the corner in time to see Capwolf pick the man up and throw him into the opposite wall. He landed in a heap and moved no more.

Dr. Interpose pressed himself against the barrier of his cell. “Why look at you, my finest creation! Ah, magnificent...proof that the formula works!”

Capwolf straightened up to loom in front of the barrier in the shredded remains of his Captain America uniform, jaws dripping blood. “Want to see up close?” he growled.

Dr. Interpose cackled. “Under better circumstances, my dear, I will get my chance.”

Bucky came up alongside Capwolf. “C’mon. Leave this piece of shit where he’s at. He’s not going anywhere tonight.”

“No,” Capwolf agreed, turning to leave with him, “he’s not.”

Battle had their blood up. They made up an excuse to separate from Wanda and spirited each other away to their (renovated) suite. They were out of their clothes lightning fast. There was no time to waste when there was victory sex to be had.

Capwolf backed up to the couch and sat down on it, beckoning Bucky over. Bucky knelt between his legs and set to work finding out how much werewolf cock he could deep throat at once. The answer was an impressive amount, but there was still more of it than he could fit down his throat, and once Steve’s knot inflated in his hands and come started spewing from him in sharp jets, it was too big to do more than suck on the smooth, pointed glans.

“Here, hold it here.” Capwolf took Bucky’s hand and bade him hold behind the knot, and groaned happily as he gave Bucky a veritable feast to drink down. It sprayed onto his face and chest each time he came up for air, and Bucky gleefully rubbed it all over his face.

Even he had limits, he learned. After a few minutes he started feeling nauseous from drinking too much semen, and let Capwolf coat his skin instead. It dripped down his torso in thick, hot rivulets. Mouthing the hot shaft, he swiped his flesh hand through the mess and used it as lube to stroke himself—swiped his metal hand through it to use as lube to finger himself, leaving Capwolf to hold his own cock by the knot.

“You look good in white, beautiful boy,” Capwolf crooned. “Getting yourself ready for me?”

“Yeah,” Bucky sighed, working three fingers into himself. “Gonna be nice and open for you, sir, just how you like it.”

Capwolf petted his sweaty hair, lightly scratching his scalp with his talon-tips. His other hand held his own cock by the root to aim his continuing orgasm at Bucky’s lips. “Good boy. Wear my come. I love marking you up.”

“I love being yours.” Bucky stroked himself faster with four fingers up his ass and werewolf semen streaming down his front. Nausea be damned, he couldn’t help but suck that cock a little more as he tipped over the edge and spilled his own hot seed over his fingers. As soon as he gasped his way through orgasm, Capwolf plucked him up and cleaned him off with a tongue bath, then turned Bucky around to put his tongue straight up his ass. Bucky came again on that long, rough tongue squirming across his prostate...and soon, again on Capwolf’s knot once he was ready to go again...and again...and again.

He was getting better at falling asleep with a bloated belly and a plug in his ass.

* * *

Fury ended the Avengers team meeting with an announcement. “Rogers. I’m clearing you for active duty.”

“Sir? I’m already on active duty,” Steve pointed out, frowning.

“All month.” Just to drive his point home, he explained, “Meaning you can run missions as Capwolf, under two provisions. Provision one, Scarlet Witch is to remain with you any time there’s a risk that you’ll shift during the mission. Provision two, missions on Capwolf nights are limited to operations that are covert or outside populated areas.”

“He doesn’t need my help to stave off the wolf-rage anymore,” Wanda said. “We saw that in action last night.”

“These provisions are not up for debate. You’re our insurance policy.”

Bucky piped up, arms crossed. “What about your  _ other _ insurance policy?”

“Bucky,” Steve warned quietly.

Fury gave him a look and declined to comment.

“Look,” Bucky said, gesturing with a slicing hand, “this goes for all of you: if I find out you’re carrying silver weapons again, I will tear everything down around your ears.”

Now that the instinct-driven wolf-brain no longer had sway over him, Steve looked torn for a moment—but only a moment, before he made up his mind. “And I’ll help him.” He made eye contact with Fury for a long, tense moment until Clint spoke up.

“I’m not taking up arms against Cap,” Clint said, “just putting that out there now.”

“Same,” Sam said, seeming irritated to even have to say it out loud.

“Same here,” Nat said. She met Bucky’s gaze for a moment.

“Obviously same,” Stark said. “I’m more of a gold guy anyway.”

“Same,” Wanda said quietly. “To not bearing silver against Steve, not to the gold guy thing.”

Bucky looked at his teammates with pride swelling his chest. It must have been a blue moon, because Fury actually, for once, stood down.

“Duly noted,” he said, eyeing them all. “You’re dismissed. Go get to work.”

* * *

“Hey Barnes,” Nat called after the meeting. She called him over to where she, Stark, and the others were talking in a hushed circle. Bucky joined them and dared to hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think that little circle-up is about?


	12. Epilogue: Off Through the New Day's Mist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seek the wolf in thyself.

Research continued towards any number of possible cures, all at a snail’s pace; hirasu and sitsuie were next to impossible to find, even with Dr. Stranger's occasional help. Steve and Bucky moved back to the Tower full-time. All of them did, in fact, and there was an awkward conversation with Thor when he turned up on Earth a few months later as to why the Avengers were no longer using the Avengers compound.

With Steve’s help to steady him, Bucky allowed Stark to become his mechanic. “I didn’t know how good I had it when he wouldn’t talk to me,” Bucky groaned after a particularly nerve-wracking maintenance session; but he had to admit, Tony’s results were much, much better than trying to work on the thing himself.

Bucky continued research of his own, here and there. One afternoon with a private browser session found him calling Steve (just back from therapy) over to compare a few items—and laughing when Steve went red-faced and sputtered when he saw what Bucky was deliberating over.

“This one is almost the right size,” he said, gesturing to one of the silicone items he was looking into, “but this one has a pump so you can inflate the knot.”9

“Oh my god,” Steve groaned. “You are _ mortifying _ but the thought of using that on you is pretty damn hot.”

Bucky waggled his eyebrows at him. “My only complaint is none of them look like the real deal. This one comes close but look, the head’s all wrong.”

“Gee, Buck, it’s almost like they’re not modeled after a real werewolf dick.” Steve looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and die.  _ That’s rich coming from you, pal, _ Bucky thought, snickering to himself.

He wound up buying them all. Fuck it, their pensions were good for it.

Steve, for his part, was still only half okay with the Capwolf situation. Gilliam's trial had been difficult, but at least the madman was behind bars. Quiet rumors of a wolflike monster saving people’s lives by night had started to crop up here and there, but they still had it mostly under wraps. Not having SHIELD’s resources behind them made suppressing it harder, but as Steve had said, it was more ethical their way.

A lot of things were harder without SHIELD. Tracking Darvner Construction and its like was, at times, among them, but Tony and Nat swore they were  _ this close _ to figuring out where the money was coming from where SHIELD had always failed. The future was uncertain, with various governments starting to circle the Avengers like vultures. Bucky more than half suspected they’d be in talks with the United Nations before long, and god he was not looking forward to that. Life as free agents was harder, sure, less regimented, but the peace of mind in other aspects was worth it. He trusted his team better than he could ever trust SHIELD.

So sure, what came next was anyone's guess, but they’d face it together. As long as they had each other, they could make it through anything. Wolves were always meant to run free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap!
> 
> This denouement is honestly not all I'd hoped, but I have to content myself with it. What did you think though? *Youtuber voice* Let me know in the comments!


End file.
